Our family’s journey from Nakba to genocide

On a radiant summer morning in July 1948, Mohammad Ali Hammuda — our grandfather — and his family were jolted awake by the piercing sound of gunfire.

Operation Dani, an Israeli military offensive, had reached our town of Lydd, which had been selected for a brutal cleansing of its residents.

The tale that follows is one that’s deeply etched in memory.

The roots of our paternal family

Our paternal family’s roots are anchored in Madinat al-Lydd — now known as the City of Lod in Greater Tel Aviv.

The specific land where we originate stands under what is today Ben Gurion Airport. Although once called Matar al-Lydd (Lydd Airport), the current name was taken from the architect of our displacement.

Our grandmother hailed from Yaffa (Jaffa), a vibrant city with bustling marketplaces and narrow alleys. Our grandfather later moved to Yaffa, where he completed his primary and secondary education, navigating his formative years amidst the rising Zionist project.

Their lives came to be indelibly marked by the 1937 Peel Partition Commission, which laid the groundwork for implementing the Balfour Declaration and establishing a Jewish homeland at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population.

And by the mid-1940s, the consequences of these actions had become starkly evident, with Zionist militant groups escalating their campaign of terror.

Invasion of al-Lydd and wave of terrorism

The Zionist militants bombed the King David Hotel in 1946 and launched a widespread wave of terrorism, including lynchings, executions, and booby-trapping the bodies of British soldiers and Palestinian civilians.

Amidst the relentless attacks on Yaffa, our grandfather returned to his birthplace in al-Lydd.

It was against this backdrop of escalating Zionist terrorism and the end of the British Mandate on 14 May 1948 that our family would confront the full, harrowing reality of the Nakba.

Soon after, Zionist militias invaded al-Lydd. Our grandfather’s entire family was still together, clinging to a fragile sense of normalcy. All of the town’s residents over the age of 22 were rounded up by these militant forces and herded into one of the local mosques.

Among those captured were our grandfather and great-grandfather. While our grandfather was kept inside the mosque, deprived of food, drink, and sanitation, our great-grandfather was escorted, with dozens of others, elsewhere.

Our great-grandfather’s summary execution

Under the command of Yigal Allon, later serving as Interim and Deputy Prime Minister of the Zionist entity, the militias opened fire on the escorted men.

Our great-grandfather was among the many who were summarily executed that day, killed in cold blood alongside his neighbours and friends.

Around 176 bodies were pulled from the mosque, a mere fragment of the 426 men, women, and children massacred in that single day. The men of al-Lydd resisted valiantly, but armed only with old rifles, they were no match for the onslaught of heavily-armed mobs equipped with aircraft and heavy artillery.

The town became the first victim of Zionist aerial bombardment, and al-Lydd collapsed under the relentless assault.

One man per family left alive to carry the scars

In a brutal application of the Zionist policy of ethnic cleansing, one man from each family was often left alive to shepherd the surviving women and children during their forced displacement.

For our family, that survivor was our grandfather, a man who would forever bear the scars of the atrocities he witnessed.

During his life, he recounted the harrowing scenes to us: Israeli troops bursting into homes, dragging out families without sparing a single household. He watched helplessly as these homes were looted, and refugees were robbed of their remaining possessions before being ordered to march towards the West Bank.

Our grandfather’s recollections were sharp and vivid, passed down to us with the same meticulous attention to detail found in Professor Ilan Pappé’s documentation in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Each retelling was a reminder of the horrors inflicted upon our family in al-Lydd, it was survival amid systematic devastation.

On the “March of Death” towards the West Bank

Now in charge of his newly widowed mother and orphaned siblings, he led their exodus from al-Lydd towards the West Bank in the hottest month of the year, without food and water. Many of them died from thirst and hunger along the way.

Around 50,000 people were driven out of al-Lydd alone.

Our grandfather took the women and children of his family, and on foot followed what became known as the March of Death towards Ramallah in the West Bank — where they would become refugees inside their own land.

Forming the path for UNRWA schools and onto Kuwait

At the time, the Jordanians had been responsible for the administration of the West Bank. And soon enough, our grandfather and the whole family were once again forcibly removed — this time to Gaza, where they settled for a while at al-Bureij Refugee Camp.

Always interested in education and ensuring that Palestinian youth were educated, he established a humble school in the refugee camp, forming the cornerstone of UNRWA’s subsequent schools.

Our grandfather’s experience as an educator eventually led him to Kuwait, where he was involved in the development of the nascent nation state after its independence. They had little in the way of educational infrastructure and so they invited Palestinians to help build their country.

al-Lydd → Ramallah → al-Bureij → Kuwait → Britain

We were born in Kuwait, but would find ourselves refugees along with our family, after Saddam Hussein invaded in 1991.

This would now be the fourth time that our family would be displaced since 1948, a continuous series of displacements, always farther and farther away from Palestine whilst those who had stolen our lands, increasingly occupied its soil.

Since that time, as a family we have been forced to sit back from afar and watch, listen, and pray, while witnessing devastation wrought on our families left behind.

In May 2021, a single Israeli airstrike killed 42 Gazans. Among them were the Kolak family — our grandmother’s — which was practically obliterated.

He was a devoted educator to his very last breath

Our grandfather was a headmaster, calligrapher, linguist, and poet.

He seized every opportunity to speak about Palestine, whether with family, guests, or in public, often recalling this experience in his 70s.

His stories were always punctuated with tears. The raw emotion of his harrowing experience never left him, even after settling in the UK.

On 11^th December 2011, we received a call that he had been rushed to hospital due to an aneurysm — specifically a burst artery in his stomach — and needed immediate surgery.

We rushed to hospital but, by the time we arrived, he had already passed away; the surgeons had needed to administer anaesthetics.

We asked a surgeon about his last words. They told us that as he slipped under the veil of anaesthesia with a voice trailing into silence, he whispered,

“Doctor, take a seat next to me; let me tell you about Palestine.”

Generational trauma that continues to this day

Today, as a genocide scars Gaza like never before, the stories our grandfather told remain painfully relevant.

This recent devastation by the Israelis has claimed over sixty members of our extended family and their loved ones.

There remains only one home for the entirety of those left behind. It spans two floors with an apartment on each, and one hundred people are currently sharing those two floors — unable to find anywhere else to live.

Our families tell us that they have now reached the point where they are collecting leaves in order to find ways to survive.

Despite everything that Gazans have been through — over decades of murder, forced displacement, siege, and devastation — this latest episode has still come as a shock to the system.

Allah has total control over what is to come!

This story is most certainly not unique to our family; it is but a glimpse into the enduring pain that every Palestinian carries, each with their own Nakba story.

The sum total of these stories continues to reverberate through generations, shaping the reality of Palestinians everywhere today. But more importantly, it leaves a powerful and irresistible influence on the events of tomorrow.

Just as the Qur’ān spoke of Prophet Yūsuf’s pain of estrangement and enslavement, Allah also reassured him in the same breath:

وَكَذَلِكَ مَكَّنَّا لِيُوسُفَ فِي الْأَرْضِ وَلِنُعَلِّمَهُ مِنْ تَأْوِيلِ الْأَحَادِيثِ وَاللَّهُ غَالِبٌ عَلَى أَمْرِهِ وَلَكِنَّ أَكْثَرَ النَّاسِ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ

“And thus We established Yūsuf in the land to teach him the interpretation of events. And Allah has full power over His affairs, but most people do not know.” [1]

Also read

• Knowing freedom in light of Palestine
• Students are the vanguard of justice today
• To resist genocide is Gaza’s indomitable choice

Source: Islam21c

Notes

[1] al-Qur’ān, 12:21