We had a guest from Gaza

"Are they threatening the people of Gaza with death? What can death do to us? By God, for nearly all the people of Gaza death is now something they long for, in order to be reunited with those who went before them. They think we will give up as the Zionists' attacks drag on, yet this only increases the strength of our resistance. What can stop people who long for death?"

As Mustafa Abu Ali, who lost three children, his wife and his mother as martyrs in the bombardments of genocidal Israel in Gaza after 7 October, says these words, his eyes drift, he swallows, his voice breaks a little, and he collects himself and continues, saying "Alhamdulillah":

"Of course longing for death is perhaps a separate state of mind that has strongly spread to nearly all the people of Gaza in the course of this process, but we, as the people of Gaza, are aware of a responsibility of the resistance that goes beyond the people of Gaza alone. Resistance and martyrdom are not a loss; there is no being defeated on this path. By God's permission we know what we are doing, and our calculations are of course not only about this world. In this world we of course have a responsibility to work with heart and soul to stop the oppression of the Zionist occupation. On this path we also try to put forth, with strategy, tactics, planning and action, what no one has done or has been able to do."

Abu Ali was this week's guest of our conversation, held every Wednesday at the Ankara centre of the METU Alumni Association Foundation (MEBİVA). He is the director of a hospital and centre for the disabled that Deniz Feneri established in Gaza. He took on this post after leaving the Israeli prison, which he entered at the age of 20 and where he experienced every kind of torture and inhuman treatment for 10 years. When he tells how, in return for the 10 years spent in prison and taken from him, the Almighty God, as a reward for his endurance, provided for him a wife who is a garden of paradise on earth, he becomes tearful once again. Along with that wife, God also gave him three children, each more beautiful and sweeter than the other. With each of them he always thought he was making up for the years lost in prison. His mother is a hafiz of the Qur'an and every year, to consolidate her memorisation, she takes part in competitions and examinations at her age. In the last examination she took she got 97 out of 100. They lie down with the Qur'an and rise with the Qur'an. Both their children and their homes are constantly illuminated by the light of the Qur'an.

The genocide that began on 7 October took all these children from Mustafa.

All the listeners' eyes fill and tears fall at these accounts. But he immediately collects himself and goes on: "My story is perhaps one of the most average among what is going on in Gaza right now. Right now, in these inhuman attacks that began only after 7 October, there are 50 thousand martyrs in Gaza, and the story of each of them resembles mine. Mine is not more than theirs, or more painful than theirs.

There are people who, with nearly all their relatives, will be struck from the civil register, only one of them left, and he himself pulled from under the rubble. The first thing he does when he comes out is to thank God and say Hasbunallah wa ni'ma al-wakil."

Hamas's present political leader Ismail Haniyeh also had three children and 5 grandchildren martyred just the other day. At the time he received the news he was in a hospital in Doha visiting wounded Gazans receiving treatment. He did not break composure for a moment; he too said alhamdulillah and continued his visits. "The blood of my children is no more precious than the blood of the 50 thousand people martyred in Gaza." Before these, 60 more of his close or distant relatives had been martyred.

There is oppression in Gaza, there are of course the most savage, most cruel, most barbaric attacks that human history could see in Gaza, but the Gazans do not simply weep at the oppression that has befallen them and display helplessness. By showing that they will resist to the last drop of their blood, they show humanity that there can be no excuse for bowing down before the oppressor. Neither the oppressor's destructive, killing power frightens them, nor do the property, rank, favour or reward he would withhold or give tempt them. Global Zionism has taken the whole world captive in this way; only in Gaza does it give up, unable to take it over. This drives it mad. The madder it grows, the more savage it becomes, and the more savage it becomes, the more it goes out of control and loses standing.

The attention shown to Gaza is not only because the situation there is tragic and inhuman. In essence, many inhuman crimes have been committed in many places in the world, in the past and today. But probably none of them, like Gaza and as much as Gaza, has at the same time given people an enlightenment, and held up a ray of hope for freedom. With the pains it suffers Gaza not only shows its own condition, but through it shows all of humanity the true face of a hypocritical, racist, fraudulent and inhuman order to which they are subjected.

The Gazans are not in a pitiable state; they are in a state to be looked upon with envy, to be taken as an example, and to make us reflect on our own pitiable condition. In answer to a question, Abu Ali explained that, despite all the pain they have suffered, all the martyrs they have given, all the homes of theirs that have been destroyed, none of the Gazans holds the resistance responsible for what has happened, and on the contrary everyone supports Hamas with all their heart.

Mustafa Abu Ali himself insisted, emphatically, that he did not want to present his own story as a very special one. The delicacy and magnanimity in his making so ordinary the suffering he has endured, enough for a world, and bringing forward Gaza's real great cause, seemed to have come out of epics.

The humility and nobility he displayed while trying to explain that in every single household in all of Gaza there are stories the same as his or much greater told us a great deal about Gaza.

We too saluted this nobility and asked our Gazan guest only one thing: In what environment did such beautiful people, as if come out of the age of the Noble Companions, grow up? Which educational institution raised them, and how?