Fatima Ghazzal

Fatima Khalil Ghazzal belonged to a peasant family of Azzun, a town in what was then the Tulkarm district. In the Palestinian manner she is known by her husband’s name — Ahmad Ghazzal Suwaydan — and she had three children by him: a son, Mahmud, and two daughters, Ghazala and Zahiyya, who married into al-Tira in the Triangle and Kafr Thulth near Qalqilya. She was past fifty when the Great Palestinian Rebellion broke out in the spring of 1936.

On 26 June 1936 a battle was fought in Wadi Azzun, on the ground west of the town, between the rebels and the forces of the British Mandate. The fighters holding that ground had gathered under the olive trees, and Fatima Ghazzal was carrying food and water out to them. British soldiers shot her as she did it. The Palestinian Encyclopedia of An-Najah National University, which keeps the account of her life, is precise about what she was doing when she was killed and unsentimental about who she was: a village woman doing what village women did throughout the revolt, and killed for it.

That role was not incidental to the fighting. The women of the villages supplied the fighters in the hills with food and water, carried ammunition hidden in the firewood they balanced on their heads, hid weapons in bread ovens and garden walls and house wells, and ran the relay of information between the towns and the countryside that told the rebels where the British columns were. It is precisely because the work was routine that the death of the woman doing it was a shock; Palestinians have counted Fatima Ghazzal ever since as the first woman martyr of the modern national movement.

Her family did not stop. Her son Mahmud fought in the same revolt, and in 1939, three years after his mother was killed, the Mandate executed him for the killing of an Arab agent of the British in Jerusalem. He is buried in the Bab al-Asbat cemetery there. Azzun named its oldest girls’ school after his mother — the Martyr Fatima Ghazzal Basic School for Girls — which is the ordinary Palestinian way of keeping a name: not a monument but a classroom register read out every morning.

The Institute for Palestine Studies holds a photograph from 1936, from the collection of the Palestine Liberation Organization, captioned simply “Fatima Khalil Ghazal and other fighters behind their weapons.” It is one of the very few images of the revolt in which a woman is not in the background.

Sources

• الشهيدة فاطمة غزال — دائرة المعارف الفلسطينية، جامعة النجاح الوطنية (Palestinian Encyclopedia, An-Najah National University)
• Resistance of men and women, 1936 (photograph, PLO Collection) — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Armed struggle in the 1936 Great Arab Revolt — The Palestinian Museum