Amal Shabat is delirious with pain.
She is weeping, still unable to grasp that her 23-year-old son has been killed by Israel, exactly as he always said he would die – a “martyr” who sacrificed himself to make sure the world knew what was happening in Gaza.
She tries the words haltingly: “My son is a martyr, Hossam… My son is a hero.”
Hossam Shabat, Al Jazeera Mubasher journalist, was killed by Israel in a targeted strike on his vehicle on Monday.
A mother’s pain
Amal is in Hossam’s “Dar Azaa” (house of condolences), a space opened for people to come pay their respects to the family.
Sitting among female relatives, she breaks down and lowers her head on a shoulder to cry. The women do their best to comfort her, telling her Hossam died a hero, loved by everyone.
In addition to his journalistic work, Hossam used his movements and connections to bring humanitarian assistance to people in need who could not access it, his family says.
“He’s appeared in people’s dreams,” Amal’s sister tells her. “He was radiant, like a bridegroom.”
In moments of great pain, turning to such omens is believed to bring some relief to the bereaved.
Refusing to leave the north
Amal and Mahmoud, Hossam’s 28-year-old brother, speak to Al Jazeera Mubasher, alternating between resignation and tears.
Amal tries to paint a picture of the son she returned to the north of Gaza to be near, only to lose him to an Israeli attack.
“When we were displaced to the south, he walked with us part way, but didn’t want to leave here. The whole time we were in Nuseirat [in central Gaza], I would call and beg him to come, but he refused.”
Mahmoud says Hossam was determined to document Israel’s attacks in the north of Gaza, because he knew that without coverage, the violence would be brushed under the carpet. And that was why Hossam stayed in the north, he says.
Eventually, after a ceasefire was declared in late January, the family was able to return to Gaza City to reunite with Hossam. But, Amal says, even then it was hard to spend time with him and she found herself going to wherever he was working.
“‘What’re you doing here, Mother?’ he’d ask me when I went to find him,” she says. “I’d answer that I was just there to see him, to spend a bit of time with him.”
Knowing he would die
Early on in the war, Hossam had started to tell his family that he knew Israel would kill him, but that he felt it was his duty to keep doing what he was doing.
“He knew, he knew that to be a journalist in Gaza, to tell the truth, meant that he would be killed,” Mahmoud says, adding that Hossam had been threatened before and had already escaped being killed once.
Watching her son rush towards danger wasn’t easy for Amal, she says. “Whenever someone called him, whenever someone said something happened somewhere, he would fly, he was like a bird.
“Wherever there was destruction, wherever there was death, he would head there. I was scared, I would tell him to stay back, to stay away from the danger.
“But he replied: ‘Mother, it is written, even if I were at home, if you hid me in your arms, they would kill me.’
“‘I’m a martyr, I know it,’ he’d say to me. Just think of me as being away on a journey.”
And so she would wait for him, she says, waiting to hear every morning whether he was all right or if he had been killed. She soon feared the sound of phones ringing, worrying they would bring bad news.
The heart of a child
Hossam’s colleagues spoke to Al Jazeera’s Arabic site about a larger-than-life character, full of love, joy, and always willing to help.
“Hossam touched people’s pain, with his camera and his voice. The people in the shelters and tents, he was completely in tune with their suffering and they loved and followed him,” Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Quraiqaa said.
“He was always there – during displacements, under Israeli bombardment, and in the face of death.”
So much so, his journalist friend Youssef Fares said, that even other journalists would urge him to take it easy, to be more careful as he continued to push right ahead.
“Hossam was very innocent, he had the heart … of a large child. But he was so impulsive that it went too far.
“We would retreat when the bombing got too much, but he would go closer, to cover it. We were scared for him often.”
‘At least I could bury him’
When Mahmoud starts talking, his eyes are red and his voice is subdued.
“Hossam wanted to tell the whole truth. He wanted to transmit that to the world,” he says. “He would always, always say: ‘The coverage will continue. It will continue even if the price is death.’”
Mahmoud breaks down, his words choked as he looks to the side, trying not to cry.
“If a massacre happens and nobody documents it, it is as if it never happened,” he says haltingly, his lips trembling.
“Someone had to do it, and Hossam was that hero. No matter how many times we told him he’d done enough, he kept telling us he couldn’t stop and even if he did, the [Israeli] occupation would never forgive him for having been a journalist.”
Hossam’s family worried while they were displaced, so much so that their conversation often turned to trying to figure out what they would do if Hossam were killed while they were away.
“We were actually talking and wondering how…” Mahmoud’s words fled in a gasping breath as he tried to stop crying. “… how we would organise a ‘Dar Azaa’ for Hossam if we had to do it in the tent camp.
“But, in the end, God was kind. Kind enough to allow us to return and be with him for 30, 40 days, although we barely saw him.
“I thanked God that I was here, that I could walk in his funeral procession and bury him … at least that.
“Imagine that – thanking God that you were there when your brother died and were able to bury him.”
