NAPLUSIAN LETTER
Palestinian “heroes” die young. They rise in glory in haste. Their feats of arms are uncertain. Look at Ibrahim Al-Nabulsi, killed at 18 in August. His funeral gathered thousands of people in Nablus, a middle-class city in the northern West Bank. He had shot an officer and Israeli settlers, without killing. He had escaped two army raids. He had reappeared on TikTok, the Chinese video-sharing network. He did not claim to belong to any party, but to all the brigades. His “martyrdom” has powerfully resonated in the territories, where a youth without prospects is reconnecting with the armed struggle.
A pale boy with a long face, slender and pious like his mother, Ibrahim Al-Nabulsi grew up on a hill in the century-old family home. He is a swimmer, calm. Her father, Alah, has a junior rank of major in preventive security; A former prisoner in Israel, he joined this force in 1994, which is supposed to suppress opposition to the Oslo peace accords. “I believed in something great: a state, the peace that Israel never wanted to give us, say today allah. My son’s generation is angry with us and their resistance is legitimate. »
A schoolboy, Ibrahim rocked soldiers south of Nablus. He runs behind his four-year-old, Adham Mabrouka. He admires this strong man, nicknamed “the Chechen”, red-haired and laughing, the type to slip a finger-snap firecracker into a friend’s cigarette. Adham is the first to land in an Israeli prison, then in a Palestinian prison. He is accused of having stored explosives with a second friend, Mohammed Al-Dakhil, and of having shot at Palestinian policemen.
Ibrahim joins his two friends in the cell at 15, in the spring of 2019. “He was wanted by Israel. Palestinian preventative security held them for six months ‘to protect them’”, says his father. They confide in their friends that they have suffered torture. Ibrahim’s mother, Houda, finds him “more aggressive” at its output. “He wanted revenge on Israel.
Ibrahim is not yet 16 and escapes him. He goes into hiding. “I kissed him when I saw him in the old town”, she says. On a shelf in the living room, a photo shows them together, sitting on a sunny doorstep. Alah put an arm around his son’s shoulder. Ibrahim has placed the M16 assault rifle on his knees, which never leaves him.
“He was a kid”
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