“By God, a 100 deaths would be easier than what I lived.”
In this episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo brings us the testimony of Hajjeh An’am Mahmoud Abu Nahl—Umm Hashim—an elderly mother from Al-Bureij, Gaza, who now crosses the rubble of her destroyed neighbourhood with a walker, yet carries her people’s story upright.
Her home in eastern Bureij was bombed; she lives now in the A’idoun camp, under a ceasefire that never feels like one.
“We’re supposed to be living under a ceasefire,” she says, “but every now and then we still hear strikes.”
When the war began, she fled with her disabled son—from home to schools, from schools to Rafah, from Rafah to Deir al-Balah—pushing his cart through phosphorus and fear.
“If it weren’t for fear and bombing, I would never have left with my son.” The day of the landing, she ran barefoot: “Blood came from our feet as we ran over broken glass to escape death.”
The wound that took her walk came later. A strike near the camp killed her brother-in-law as he combed his hair, and shrapnel crushed her thigh. In a hospital without anaesthesia, two doctors pulled the bone back into place with a sand weight.
“My voice reached the sky,” she recalls. “May God never show anyone that moment—not a Muslim, not a Jew.”
Her indictment reaches beyond the bombs to a lifetime of siege: six hours of electricity a day, closed crossings where patients die waiting, fishermen shot at for casting their nets. “’ Occupation’—the word itself is fear, terror, instability.” And when she returned home, only the front wall remained:
“Everything was stolen. We found nothing. Nothing left. Alhamdulillah.”
In the studio, pro-Palestinian activist Serena Oliver joins Sakina to reflect on what such steadfastness—sumud—asks of the world: that witness become action, and that solidarity outlast the headlines.
Umm Hashim attends psychological and physical support sessions, grieving for a generation she fears will never heal:
“Our children; all of them are mentally affected. The next generation needs outside help.”
And still she refuses to surrender.
“Peace between us and them? It will never happen. Never. We are in steadfastness until the end of time.” To those who march for Gaza—from Baghdad to London to Kuala Lumpur—she offers a blessing: “By God, when you stand with us, our hearts find relief.”
In Umm Hashim’s hands—gripping her walker beneath a sky that still bombs—resistance is not a slogan. It is survival, memory, and sumud. And as long as she keeps walking through the wreckage of her home, the world cannot say it did not know.
