Jabaliya: Several thousand mourners on Wednesday joined the funeral procession for the wife and baby son of Hamas’s military commander, Mohammad Deif, angrily demanding revenge against Israel.
Firing Kalashnikovs into the air, they carried the bodies of 27-year-old Widad and her seven-month-old son, Ali, who were killed in a deadly air strike on Gaza City late on Tuesday. “I’m like all the other people in the Gaza Strip. I am no different from the others who have lost children. This is like a tsunami,” said Widad’s angry father, Mustafa Harb Asfura, 56.
When his university-educated daughter married Deif seven years ago, her father feared it was a death sentence.
“My daughter knew she would die a martyr when she decided to marry Mohammad Deif. Every moment since then I’ve been expecting to hear that she has died,” he said.
Grief-stricken, Asfura carried his tiny grandson from the family’s small home in Jabaliya for prayers at the mosque, his body wrapped in a white sheet exposing his white face with bruising around the eyes.
Male relatives carried Widad’s body, wrapped in a green Hamas flag and white sheet, on their shoulders.
Asfura said he had only seen his son-in-law once, when the couple married.
After that, he didn’t even know where his daughter was living, such is the secrecy that surrounds Deif in his determination to avoid detection by Israel.
Widad and Deif had two daughters and a son together. She also had two sons from a first marriage, the family said.
The two bodies were wrapped in green Hamas flags as they were carried from the mosque to the cemetery in Jabaliya refugee camp. Mourners also carried the flag-wrapped bodies of two men killed in an air strike on Wednesday on a motorcycle, both presumed Hamas militants.
“Revenge, revenge, revenge,” shouted the crowd as they walked towards the cemetery waving Hamas flags and denouncing the killing of the second wife and infant son of Deif, head of the Ezz Al Deen Brigades.
“We were shocked when we heard that Mohammad Deif’s wife had been killed. We ask Ezz Al Deen Qassam Brigades to avenge this killing, this massacre,” said a 22-year-old mourner who gave his name as Mohammad.
