“He went out to bring me some flour. He came back carrying his own blood.”
In this episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo brings us the testimony of Ruaida Ahmad Al-Abed Oweida—a 56-year-old mother from Al-Zaytoun, Gaza, now displaced into a tent: mother of a martyr, and keeper of every loss the war has written into her family.
She begins where Gaza begins now: in a tent.
“We were displaced from our homes, as you can see. Why are we here? We’re living in a tent. And cold keeps cutting through us.”
The first loss came with the first hunger. From the earliest days of the war, there was famine—no food, no water. When flour was finally allowed in, her eldest son rushed to fetch it, despite her warning.
“I told him: ‘You will come back burdened, not with flour but with something else.’ And he did. He came back carrying his own blood. The flour was soaked in blood. That’s how they say it.”
Hit in the leg, then followed by a drone—neck and back. He held on until Asr prayers. At Al-Ma’amdani hospital, they told her only: “Go home. He’s not dead, not martyred. Just go home.” Later, they brought him to her.
The tragedies kept arriving: her son-in-law, out to bring food for his children, struck by a missile; two of her sister’s sons, killed by a drone in Shuja’iyya while carrying clothes and canned food.
“They returned with nothing. Not even their own bodies.”
“I think I’m one of those people whose tears have dried from crying for the martyrs,” she says. And when she sought help for the children now clinging to her: “Every charity says: ‘We haven’t opened yet. We’re still dealing with earlier orphans.’ What is the guilt of these children?”
Yet what the war took, it also forged. The woman who once feared even the market discovered she could bury her son, face armies, and feed children on ground barley cooked on a metal sheet.
“My personality used to be so weak, so weak... But the war taught me everything. Now, I could stand up to the strongest man. In war, the woman becomes the man.”
Her Al-Zaytoun streets are gone—”roads bulldozed, streets gone”—so that even the sea feels unreachable. And still she cooks, feeds, teaches: “Read the Qur’an for them. Give them stories. If you leave them, they won’t grow.”
In the studio, pro-Palestinian activist Tanya Manzoor joins Sakina to sit with Ruaida’s testimony—and what such endurance asks of the world: that grief be witnessed as strength, and that solidarity outlast the headlines.
Ruaida’s final words are not for herself, but for those who come after:
“I wish the world would stand with us... We don’t want much. Just look at these children. God willing, one day there will be a Palestinian state with stability and safety.”
In Ruaida’s hands—ladling barley porridge into a child’s bowl beneath a tent marked “110”—resistance is patience turned into parenting, mourning turned into memory. And as long as she keeps feeding the children the war orphaned, the world cannot say it did not know.
