Between Tal, Bureen, and Oseira: A Repeated Tale of Martyrs

Author: Hafez al-Barghouti

Between Farouk Ramadan, the martyr of Tal, and Hamdan al-Najjar, the martyr of Bureen, the incident repeated after 38 years. On a sunny winter afternoon at the beginning of 1988, Hamdan al-Najjar was grazing his sheep in the hills of Bureen when the settlement guard disturbed him, coming down to him when he saw him performing the noon prayer, cursing God and the Prophet. Hamdan expressed his annoyance with the guard repeatedly. Hamdan was not just a shepherd; he had studied surveying, was a volunteer muezzin at the mosque, and was unemployed. It happened that the occupation forces had arrested his younger brother who was grazing the sheep of their father, the famous folk poet.

When I visited his demolished home after the incident, his father, wrapped in his cloak, accompanied me to the rubble of the demolished house. A black dog lay between the remnants, resting its head on the ground, and Hamdan's father addressed the dog, saying, "Your owner Hamdan has gone," and he added that since the incident, the dog had not eaten or moved (it died days after my visit). The dog was the only witness to what happened between Hamdan and the settlement guard, remaining sad and motionless with tears in its eyes. We returned to what remained of the house, a nearby shed, and found Hamdan's coat hanging on the wall. His other brother said, "These are remnants of Hamdan's blood. Come closer and smell the scent; it was a strange, penetrating smell that I had never encountered before, and he said it was the scent of musk.

No one knows what happened to Hamdan that afternoon except for the sad dog. According to what Hamdan used to say about the annoying guard, he must have been praying when the guard came as usual, cursing and insulting. As soon as he finished his prayer, he grabbed a stone, struck the guard up close, took his weapon, killed him, and descended towards the main road where a military patrol passed by, perhaps drawn by the sound of gunfire. He opened fire on them, killing two soldiers and an officer before he was martyred by the gunfire of forces that rushed to the scene.

Only his coat, his blood, and the musk of Hamdan remained. Fate dictated that shortly after, another young man would be martyred in the nearby village of Oseira. I headed there as I was collecting stories of martyrs to publish in the Kuwaiti Al-Qabas and kept some of the curiosities I encountered, later compiling them in a book I published in Amman in early August 1990.

In the house of the martyr of Oseira, where my memory failed me about his name while writing this article, I found a diary of the martyr. The last entry, as I read it, said that attacks on the settlers should be intensified because they are expanding and killing. We prayed the evening prayer and added to it the two units and completed the Molotov cocktails, putting our trust in God to attack the occupation patrols.

I flipped through the remaining pages of the diary, took a cigarette angrily, and searched for my lighter. Someone said to me, "It's in front of you on the plate on the table." In the glass plate, there was a lighter, a prayer bead, and other things. Someone present remarked that it was the martyr's lighter. I picked it up and lit the cigarette, noticing its dark brown color. Someone said, "It was in his pocket when he was martyred; this is his blood."

I smelled the lighter more than once, and the same scent of the martyr Hamdan's blood rose, perhaps it was the musk, even though I do not know musk. The attendees smiled, and someone said, "You are very observant."