‘I’ll be killed beside him’: A Palestinian mother’s desperate quest to bury her son
“Every day I watch her go out to face death because her son is lying there in front of her, and she can’t even reach him or say goodbye.”
Suffering in the Gaza Strip comes in many forms. While many mothers mourn the loss of their children, some struggle to gather the scattered remains of their own flesh and blood into a somewhat recognisable whole before burying them. Yet there are some mothers who ache just to find the bodies of their dead children so they can give them dignified burials and a final resting place.
Umm Muhammad Abu Khamash (54), in Deir al-Balah, had been carrying out a daily vigil for nearly two weeks near the so-called yellow line to retrieve the body of her martyred son so that she could bury him. But the Israelis threatened to shoot her if she moved towards her son’s body, which lay on the murderous side of the “yellow line.”
Umm Muhammad had reached out to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Palestine Red Crescent Society, making repeated appeals for the retrieval of her son’s body, but all of her attempts ended in failure.
She decided to try herself. She approached to within about 50 metres of the Israeli-occupied part of the “yellow line” before Israeli tanks responded by firing around her. Meanwhile, quadcopter drones flew overhead and fired nearby to force her to retreat, she told Ultra Palestine.
Umm Muhammad was threatened by an Israeli intelligence officer if she crossed the arbitrary “yellow line.” “He told me, ‘Go back... I’ll shoot you’,” she recounted.
She feared that after days of lying unattended, her son’s body may have decomposed or been devoured by dogs — a common occurrence in Gaza since the start of the Israeli genocide. Nevertheless, she insisted upon securing his body to give him a dignified burial. She was even willing to cross the “yellow line” to reach her son:
“I will not give up. If they don’t allow me to recover my son’s body, I’ll cross the ‘yellow line’ after turning on my phone’s camera. Either I’ll be killed beside him, or I’ll document the moment his body is recovered.”
Odeh Abu Khamash, Muhammad’s father, said that his son had suffered from a psychological disorder for several years. Before the genocide, the family would admit him to hospital, and after a few days of treatment, he would return home in an improved condition.
But the genocidal Israeli onslaught that began in October 2023 changed everything.
Odeh told Ultra Palestine that the past several months had been especially difficult for Muhammad, particularly after the death of his brother. His condition deteriorated to the point where he frequently lost awareness of his surroundings and spent long nights either screaming or wandering without fully understanding what was happening around him.
The father recounted his son’s last day, explaining that at 2 am he crossed the “yellow line,” which keeps snaking westwards and squeezing Palestinians into an ever-shrinking territory:
“Last Friday night, Muhammad left the house and headed east. When he reached the area beyond the ‘yellow line,’ he was struck by a reconnaissance drone.”
Odeh’s anguish was the result not only of losing his son, but also of the family’s inability to give him a dignified burial as his corpse lay unattended barely a few hundred metres away.
“We dug his grave, hoping we would bury him, but it remains open to this day,” he told Ultra Palestine. “His body is no more than 300 metres from his grave, but we can’t reach it.”
The heartbroken father spoke of his wife’s daily vigil with visible anguish:
“Every day I watch her go out to face death because her son is lying there in front of her, and she can’t even reach him or say goodbye.”
Umm Muhammad finally recovered her son’s remains this Friday. All that remained of Muhammad was a collection of bones, which she carried in a plastic bag wrapped in bed linen, holding it close to her bosom.
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