“I said goodbye to them through a phone.”
In this episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo brings us the testimony of Umm Hammad Ahmad Al-Abd Al-Kheissi—a mother and grandmother from Al-Shuja’iya, east of Gaza City, whose kunya carries her son’s name, and whose son would become her martyr.
Her war is a ledger of flights: Deir al-Balah at midnight; four months in the Malaysian School; back to Deir al-Balah; then Rafah; then the sea at Al-Mawasi, where the water was salty, and the children cried; then nine months among Al-Zawayda’s olive trees, where people came to charge her rent for the land; then one room downstairs in a ruined Gaza City, Ramadan under shelling. “So many journeys,” she says.
Through it all, famine. She kneaded flour mixed with sand for her children.
“They told me, ‘Mother, this is sand, not flour.’ I told them, ‘This is all we have.’”
Then came the day of the leaflets again—and with it the martyrdom of her twenty-two-year-old daughter, pregnant, mother of two, and of her daughter’s husband on the same day. “You don’t know whether to go comfort your daughter after her husband was martyred, or to gather your children and your belongings and run for your life.”
In the yard of the Baptist Hospital, a drone fired on her four-year-old grandson at her side; shelling stones fell on an empty tent. She fled again—cart broken, sleeping in the open, walking from six in the morning until sunset while a pregnant relative miscarried from exhaustion. Fifteen of them now sleep on one mattress.
“I appeal to the world to give my children mattresses. We have none.”
When her widowed, pregnant daughter went into labour, the ambulance never came—calling from one o’clock until nearly ten. Umm Hammad stood at doors begging for a car, and brought her daughter home from a C-section in a tuk-tuk, bouncing over every bump.
And then the phone: her son Hammad and his own son, martyred in Al-Shuja’iya while pitching a tent on the ground where her martyr once stood. She was in the south; they were in Gaza. She farewelled them through a screen: “May God make your grave a garden of Paradise.”
In the studio, decolonial educator and intersectional activist Soulful Si joins Sakina to sit with Umm Hammad’s testimony—grief as witness, displacement as method, and the motherhood that holds a people together when everything else falls.
Umm Hammad’s verdict on the present is unflinching:
“Drones won’t let us sleep, and they call it a truce. Where is the truce? What truce?”
Her wish, though, is the simplest a mother can voice: “I want peace in the world. I want to live safe with my kids.”
In Umm Hammad’s hands—steadying a newborn swaddled in green beneath a tent’s torn canopy—resistance is memory, motherhood, and the refusal to let grief end the line. And as long as she keeps naming her children and counting their losses aloud, the world cannot say it did not know.
