GAZA CITY, 31 January 2006— To get to Umm Nidal’s front door, visitors have to pass a piece of chicken-wire with a hole on it, which she has placed demonstratively on the wall of the courtyard leading to her northern Gaza house. It’s a section of the security fence which surrounded the former Jewish settlement of Atzmona and was removed after Israel’s military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in September.
“Through this Mohammed got into the settlement,” say letters spray-painted in black on the wall. They refer to Umm Nidal’s son, who in March 2002 attacked a religious seminary in the southern Gaza Strip settlement and killed five Jewish students, firing at random and throwing grenades, before he was shot dead himself.
His mother had kissed the 19-year-old goodbye on the cheek, in a video-taped scene broadcast around the world. Umm Nidal is known in the Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City, her hometown, as the “mother of the martyrs,” because two of her sons, including Mohammed, died in attacks against Israel, while a third was killed in a targeted airstrike on a car carrying militants in Gaza in September.
Now she sits in the new Palestinian Parliament as one of seven female representatives of the Islamic movement Hamas. Umm Nidal has been a member of Hamas since its foundation in 1987. She holds a military rank in the movement and is perhaps its best-known female representative.
Her real name is Maryam Farahat, but according to Arab custom most people refer to her as Umm (mother) followed by the name of her eldest son Nidal. Nidal died during a botched suicide bombing at a Jewish settlement in 2003. Two of her other sons were injured during the intifida (uprising) against Israel, while the husband of one of her daughters, a Hamas militant, was also killed.
“If necessary, I will also sacrifice my other sons for the struggle,” says the 57-year-old widow. Commenting on her election, her back straight and her hands folded in her lap, her eyes deep in their sockets, she adds: “It’s a great responsibility, but Allah will help us bear it.” She wears no jewelry or makeup, only a long, black robe known as a jilbab, and a headscarf.
“I will work for the Islamization of society,” she says. Today, it is becoming rare to see women without headscarves in Gaza City. “It has become stricter,” says Amira, a student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. A year ago, she often went into the streets with her head uncovered, but now she no longer dares to.
“It’s true that there is no official prohibition, but I would be shunned and sworn at. Since the rise of Hamas in the past years, our freedoms have been restricted.”
At the neighboring Islamic University, headdresses and long jilbab robes are already mandatory.
A Hamas victory celebration has been canceled at the last minute, perhaps because the university prefers not to be known as a “Hamas institution.” Many of the Hamas leaders in Gaza, including Mahmoud Al-Zahar, teach at the Gaza City university.
