Cries of revenge as wife, baby of militant buried

AFP/Jabaliya, GazaSeveral thousand mourners poured onto Gaza streets yesterday to bury the wife and baby son of Hamas’s military chief Mohamed Deif, angrily demanding revenge against Israel and firing shots into the air. The bodies of 27-year-old Widad and her seven-month-old son Ali were taken from the wife’s family home to a mosque in Jabaliya refugee camp for prayers, then laid to rest in the sand of a cemetery. They were among at least four Palestinians killed in a deadly air strike on Gaza City late Tuesday. The bodies of a 48-year-old woman and a 14-year-old boy were pulled from the rubble yesterday. Mourners stooped down to kiss the body of Ali, who was then placed on top of his mother inside the mosque. Wrapped in green Hamas flags, they were then carried to the cemetery, along with the flag-wrapped bodies of two men killed in an air strike yesterday on a motorcycle, both presumed Hamas militants.  “Revenge, revenge, revenge!” shouted the crowd as they waved Hamas flags and denounced the killing of the second wife and infant son of Deif, head of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.  “We ask Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades to avenge this killing, this massacre,” said a 22-year-old mourner who gave his name as Mohamed. Grief-stricken, Widad’s father Mustafa Harb Asfura carried his tiny grandson into the mosque and to the cemetery, his body wrapped in a white sheet exposing his white face with an injury to the eye. “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 the angry 56-year-old. 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 Mohamed Deif. Every moment since then I’ve been expecting to hear that she has died,” he said. 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.  It was not clear where the couple’s two girls were at the time of the strike. Hundreds of people crowded into the mosque for the funeral prayers but there was no sign of any officials of Hamas. A small group of women also entered the mosque to attend the prayers. Wearing black abayas, they stayed in a separate room, sobbing in grief. Addressing the mourners, a young man passed on the condolences of the Qassam Brigades and prayers were read for the two men who died when a rocket hit their motorcycle in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.  Shortly after the funeral, a source close to the Islamist militant movement told AFP that Deif was alive and still calling the shots in the ongoing war with Israel in and around Gaza. “The head of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades Abu Khaled is still alive and leading the military operation,” the source said, using Deif’s nom-de-guerre. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said Israelis would not be safe until Deif “decides so”.