Hamas military chief’s wife, son killed

JABALIYA: Several thousand mourners on Wednesday joined the funeral procession for the wife and baby son of Hamas’s military chief Mohammed Deif, angrily demanding revenge against Israel.

Firing Kalashnikovs into the air, they carried the bodies of 27-year-old Widad and her seven-month-old son Ali, who were among at least four people killed in a deadly air strike on Gaza City late on Tuesday.

The two bodies were wrapped in green Hamas flags as they were carried from the mosque to the cemetery in Jabaliya refugee camp. Mourners also carried the flag-wrapped bodies of two men killed in an air strike Wednesday on a motorcycle, both presumed Hamas militants.

“Revenge, revenge, revenge,” shouted the crowd as they walked towards the cemetery waving Hamas flags and denouncing the killing of the second wife and infant son of Deif, head of the Ezzedine alqassam Brigades. “We were shocked when we heard that Mohammed Deif’s wife had been killed. We ask Ezzedine al-qassam Brigades to avenge this killing, this massacre,” said a 22-year-old mourner who gave his name as Mohammed.

“I’m like all the other people in the Gaza Strip. I am no different from the others who have lost children. This is like a tsunami,” said Widad’s angry father, Mustafa Harb Asfura, 56. When his university-educated daughter married Deif seven years ago, her father feared it was a death sentence. “My daughter knew she would die a martyr when she decided to marry Mohammed Deif. Every moment since then I’ve been expecting to hear that she has died,” he said.