Muhammad Hamida was 8 years old when Zionist gangs rained missiles and bombs on his village (Al Jazeera)

Occupied Jerusalem -

The elderly Muhammad Hamida talks to himself about the memories of his village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, where Zionist gangs committed one of the most horrific massacres in 1948.

Although his refugee journey spanned 76 years, the scenes of the massacre refused to leave his mind. Rather, the massacres being committed in Gaza now ignited and deepened his pain.

At his eighth asylum station south of Jerusalem, Al Jazeera Net met him while he was feeling the fruits of the fruit trees in front of his house, and he said that their taste was nothing like the fruits of his family’s trees in the displaced village of Deir Yassin.

The crime occurred hours after the funeral of the martyr Abdul Qadir al-Husseini following his martyrdom in the Battle of Qastal on April 8. At exactly two o’clock after midnight, the Zionist Irgun and Stern gangs and forces from the Palmach and Haganah stormed the village of Deir Yassin.

Deir Yassin Hall in the Islamic Heritage Museum includes a model of the village and costumes for a man and his wife who were displaced from it (Al Jazeera)

Bitter departure

Muhammad Hamida was 8 years old at the time, and after raining down grenades and mortar shells on the village and blowing up many homes and facilities, two women arrived at his family’s home and asked his mother to prepare pieces of cloth and follow them to help the wounded who had fallen in the village’s alleys and homes.

Hamida says, “My mother left me and my four brothers at home and she thought that she would return to us within hours without it crossing her mind that what was being carried out in the village was a massacre to annihilate us. At one o’clock in the afternoon, she returned to us after my uncle rebuked her and locked the house, the key of which I keep until today, and we walked toward The neighboring village of Ain Karem.

From Ain Karem, the extended Hamida family headed to Khirbet “Beit Fajus” or “Beit Umm al-Mays,” where they owned 1,200 dunams (a dunam is equal to a thousand square metres), and from there, their members, old and young, walked on foot towards the center of Jerusalem through the villages of Al-Maliha and Beit Safafa. .

Hamida continues, “We were received by a committee whose mission was to temporarily shelter the displaced, so we lived in one of Al-Aqsa’s schools for 20 days, and from there we moved to the neighboring town of Silwan, and the asylum and diaspora continued, so our journeys landed in the village of Al-Mazraa Al-Sharqiya and Khirbet Abu Falah in the Ramallah district, and from there to Aqabat Jabr camp.” In Jericho, and in the 1967 war, we were displaced to Jordan, and a year later we returned to the West Bank again.”

A model of the village of Deir Yassin in the Islamic Museum in Jerusalem (Al Jazeera)

Live scenes

A “tiresome” life. This is how Hamida describes the refugee journey, at the beginning of which his uncle and brother were forcibly killed. He says that the Nakba plunged the Palestinians into a state of astonishment, shock, and displacement, during which they experienced very harsh morale.

Therefore, those who have tasted the bitterness of this journey are the ones who most feel what the Gazans are going through now. The scenes of the displaced, barefoot and naked prisoners in the Gaza Strip brought back to his memory the scenes of their harsh lives shortly after the Deir Yassin massacre.

He said that they did not wear shoes after leaving the village until 1953, that is, after 5 years of asylum, when their father began working in Jericho, adding that the refugees now will need many years before they can rebuild themselves.

Just as the Gazans left their properties, groves and lands behind them, the Hamida family left a treasure trove of memories in Deir Yassin 76 years ago.

Regarding those memories, Hamida said that the trees of almonds, walnuts, olives, figs, grapes, and vegetables such as tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplant used to decorate their lands, and for decades they provided the land with the most delicious fruits.

From Sabra and Shatila, in Beirut in 1982, to Al-Shifa Hospital, in Gaza in 2024, the details of the massacre that has been going on for 76 years and more are repeated.

Deir Yassin, Tantura, Al-Dawayima, Lod, Ramla, Al-Safsaf, Al-Samou, Kafr Qasim, Qibya, Khan Yunis, Tal Al-Zaatar, Nabatiyeh, Al-Fakhani, Sabra and Shatila, Hammamet Al-Shat, Al-Haram... pic.twitter.com/bmyTSu1v5w

- The Palestinian Archive (@palestinian_the) April 1, 2024

Back and memories

After the massacre, Hamida returned repeatedly to Khirbet, and his last meeting with her was in 1978 when his uncle and his wife came from Jordan and asked him to take them to her.

"We sat in the shade of our trees. We picked sage, green thyme, and walnuts, and we ate lunch next to the spring. Then, we were surprised by those claiming to be from the Nature Conservation Authority. They asked about the reason for our presence. We answered them that this is our land. They replied that it was yours and now it belongs to the Israeli government."

Before they were expelled from the place, Muhammad Hamida’s uncle decided to swim in Al Ain to retrieve his childhood memories. They carried the land’s bounties and left. A month later, Muhammad returned and found that they had blown up the small farmers’ homes in the place and cut down the walnut trees.

A Jewish doctor of Russian origin now lives in his family's house in the village of Deir Yassin. After he succeeded with difficulty in reaching the house about two years ago, he asked the stranger who lived in his house to enter and tour it, but the latter replied: This house was yours and is now mine.

The house's iron doors and antique windows were thrown next to the house and neglected, but Muhammad still kept the house's iron key after his mother, "Dhiba", locked it at noon on April 9, 1948. Then she was forced to leave years later, not before she and her husband bequeathed to her five children their property in the village and the neighboring village. For her, so that they know their rights if they return to Deir Yassin one day.

Source: Al Jazeera