Funeral for Palestinian Gives Birth to Martyr

The crowd included government ministers and army commanders, sheiks and peasants. All had trudged to the end of a dusty lane in this Palestinian refugee settlement, passing the graffiti-scrawled walls to pay homage to a 26-year-old man many of them hadn’t known.

The funeral that brought them together this week was for Sgt. Mohammed Said Abdullah Shalayel, a member of the Palestinian national security force who had died of wounds received in the Mideast clashes last week.

Shalayel’s brothers, Rafat and Mansour, stood bleary-eyed in a receiving line late Tuesday night, shaking the hands of more than 1,000 visitors in the “tent of sadness” after the funeral. Young boys roamed among plastic chairs set up in the dirt. They served coffee and dates--mixing the bitter with the sweet in the Arab custom.

The turnout and the sullen, angry emotions at Jabaliya Camp, a 48-year-old settlement near Gaza City, demonstrated how the police who fought Israeli soldiers last week are now being held up as heroes by their own community. Those who died, such as Shalayel, are being remembered as martyrs.

Israel, on the other hand, maintains that the Palestinian police who opened fire last week are criminals who should now be punished by the Palestinian authorities, and that the decision to let them turn their weapons on Israelis will have grave diplomatic consequences for Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Mourners said that unless the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu changes its policies, the violence will continue. Warned Shalayel’s brother Mansour: “The whole Palestinian nation will be martyrs too.”

At the Erez checkpoint on the border between the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip and Israel, where Shalayel was shot last Thursday, Israeli soldiers expressed their own sense of anger and indignation that the Palestinian guns were turned on them.

“I don’t understand why and when and how this could happen,” said Lt. Oren Amit, an Israeli who has been working closely with Palestinian soldiers for the last six months to maintain calm in both communities. “We feel very betrayed right now.”

Faced with a barrage of rocks and Molotov cocktails, Israeli soldiers--behind barricades and fearing for their lives--had shot back with rubber bullets, he said. When the Palestinians replied with live ammunition, the Israelis had no choice but to shoot back. Amit was standing less than 30 feet from a concrete barrier in the road that still bore the ochre stains of blood from Shalayel, yet another victim in the seemingly endless conflict between Arabs and Israelis for this land, which both sides consider holy but might as easily be called cursed.

According to his colleagues and family, Shalayel had been called to duty on his day off, when demonstrations turned violent. During a lull in the fighting, he was ordered to go to his regular guard post, on the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing point between Gaza and Israel.

To get to the post, he had to pass Israeli soldiers guarding the Erez Industrial Center, which flanks the road. Rioters had thrown stones and burned tires there earlier in the day, before the gunfire began.

Ied Omari, a Palestinian police officer who was there, said Shalayel was alone on foot in the middle of the road trying to get to his regular post when he was shot in the head. In all, seven Palestinian police officers and soldiers were killed at the Erez crossing, according to a Palestinian captain. At least 10 Israelis were seriously wounded at the same site, Israeli officials said.

Throughout Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, at least 75 people have died in the recent fighting.

Shalayel lingered in a coma for more than four days. Photographs at the memorial meeting showed him to be a swaggering soldier in green fatigues, proudly fingering his Kalashnikov rifle in front of a backdrop of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. In the photograph, a cigarette dangled from his lips and his military beret was cocked on his head.

“He was a soldier like any Palestinian who wants to have a state and to protect his nation and his people,” said Rafat, the older brother.

The Shalayel family had escaped to Gaza as refugees in 1948, during the war for Israeli independence. Gaza was then under Egyptian control, but Israel took over after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Jabaliya Camp, where the Shalayel family settled, was the place where the intifada uprising against Israeli occupation began in 1987. As a youth, Shalayel took part, just like everyone else in the impoverished quarter. When Arafat came to Gaza in 1994 to set up the Palestinian-controlled zone, Shalayel enlisted out of patriotic feelings, his family said.

When he died, he had three children younger than 5, and his widow is pregnant, Rafat said. He had hoped to go back to college to become a teacher. “He was a lovely guy--quiet, good morals, well educated, a sportsman,” Rafat said. “Nobody hated him, everybody liked him.”

After a eulogy by a senior Palestinian official, members of Shalayel’s soccer team hung up a sign expressing their condolences. Then, another group marched down the lane chanting: “God loves this martyr.”

A comrade aimed a rifle in the air and fired eight shots, the flashes of which illuminated the darkness.

“It’s a good death, and we are proud of him,” Rafat concluded sadly. “Nobody would hate to be a martyr.”