JENIN, 11 March 2004 — Dalal Al-Sabagh was taking advantage of a glorious sunny day to hang out the washing on the roof of her West Bank home alongside her newborn daughter.
Seconds later, the scene of domestic bliss was shattered when a fatal gunshot rang out, leaving the 40-day-old girl without a mother.
Israeli troops had entered this northern West Bank town on Tuesday morning to arrest the local commander of Islamic Jihad.
But as fierce exchanges of fire broke out, Dalal, a 23-year-old mother of three, became the latest victim of a conflict which has now left more than 3,800 people dead in the past three and a half years.
Neighbors heard her cry out: “I’ve been hit” and rushed to her aid but were unable to save her life.
The baker next door, Abdelatif Ajawi (better known as Abu Mohammed) was one of the first on the scene.
“She told me ‘Abu Mohammad, Abu Mohammad, I’ve been hit’ as blood spurted from her throat,” he said.
Dalal was packed into a passing taxi and driven straight to the town’s Al-Razi hospital where medics pronounced her dead.
“The bullet’s trajectory shows that she was hit in the back and the bullet then exited through her neck,” the examining doctor, Fawaz Mahamid, said.
Forty days earlier, Dalal had been in the same hospital for happier reasons when she gave birth to her daughter, Hiba.
It was her first daughter after having given birth to two sons, four-year-old Ahmed and Mumen, aged three.
The baker and other witnesses said no armed militants had been anywhere near the house at the time of the shooting.
An Israeli military source confirmed that an inquiry was under way to investigate the circumstances of the killing.
The source said it was possible that the mother had been a victim of Palestinian gunfire, recalling that heavy exchanges had taken place.
Amer Rafiq Al-Ghul, who was still in a state of shock several hours after the shooting, also recalled Dalal’s last moments. “She was stretched out on the ground. She opened her mouth to tell us something but no sound came out,” he said.
“We found the baby’s clothes and her cot covered in blood,” said the 20-year-old man, who insisted that no shots had been fired at the soldiers from the area.
Dalal’s husband, Alaa Abu Al-Hassan, learned the heartbreaking news in a phone call to him in the Jordanian capital, Amman, where he was on a visit.
“My brother called me,” the 30-year-old civil servant said. “He told me that Dalal had fallen as a martyr.”
He swiftly returned home with his mother, whom he had accompanied to Jordan for her to undergo treatment for cancer.
On his return to Jenin, dozens of friends and close relatives came to offer their condolences at the family home on Hassan Abu Siriyeh Road, named after one of the first “martyrs” of the Palestinian cause.
“I fainted when I heard the news,” he said, grasping his two sons close to him, both too young to take in the tragedy that had unfolded.
Alaa and Dalal had married five years ago.
With a bonnet on her head, tiny Hiba was being cradled in the arms of her maternal grandmother Ikhlas Mahmud. Tears flowed everywhere.
“I was going to spend the night at my daughter’s home as her husband was going to be away. When I arrived at the house, the neighbors told me that she had been wounded and taken to hospital,” recalled the mother of eight for whom Dalal was the only daughter.
“I learned that she died when I arrived at the hospital,” she added.
So many people called round to the home to pay their respects that they had to sit on wooden boxes directly opposite the remains of the home of an Islamic Jihad fighter which was demolished by the Israeli Army.
