My name is Abdel.

For 12 years, I made weapons designed to kill people.

I mixed chemicals that would tear bodies apart.

I assembled devices that would end lives in seconds.

I did this with my own hands and I believed I was doing the right thing.

I believed I was serving God.

Today, I sit in a small room in a place I cannot tell you about.

My life depends on staying hidden.

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But I am alive to tell you what I saw when I died.

And I am alive to warn you about what is waiting for many people when their last breath comes.

This is my story.

Every word of it is true.

I need you to understand something before I begin.

I was not an evil man who enjoyed hurting people.

I was not a monster.

I was a man who loved his family.

I prayed five times every day.

I memorized long passages from the Quran.

I fasted during Ramadan.

I gave to the poor.

I believed with all my heart that I was on the right path.

That is what makes my story so important.

Cuz if I could be so wrong about something so serious, then maybe you need to examine what you believe too.

Let me take you back to the beginning.

Hello viewers from around the world.

Before Abdul continues his story, we’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.

Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony.

I grew up in Gaza City in a neighborhood called Alimal.

Our apartment building was old with cracks in the walls that grew wider every year.

My father sold vegetables from a cart.

My mother stayed home with us children.

We were not rich, but we had enough.

Gaza is not like other places.

War is part of normal life there.

You grow up with the sound of explosions in the distance.

You learn to recognize the different sounds.

The whistle of a rocket going out.

The boom of an Israeli air strike coming in.

The rattle of gunfire that could be close or far away.

When I was 7 years old, I was playing soccer with my friends in the street.

We used a ball made of rolled up plastic bags tied with string because we could not afford a real one.

We were laughing and shouting the way children do everywhere.

Then we heard the sound.

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It was different from the usual background noise of war.

It was closer, louder, coming toward us.

My friend Mahmud looked up at the sky.

I remember his face.

His eyes went wide.

He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Then there was a flash of light and a noise so loud it felt like my head would split open.

When I could see again, Mahmud was on the ground.

There was blood everywhere.

Too much blood.

Other children were screaming and running.

Adults came rushing out of buildings.

Someone picked me up and carried me away.

But I kept looking back at Mahmud lying there in the street.

He died before they could get him to a hospital.

He was 8 years old.

That was my first real memory of death.

It would not be my last.

By the time I was 12, I had been to 17 funerals.

Most of them were for people younger than 30.

Some were for children.

You learn to recognize the sound of women wailing.

You learn to watch men cry quietly with their faces turned away.

You learn that death can come at any moment for any reason without warning.

You also learn to be angry.

I was angry at Israel.

I was angry at America for supporting Israel.

I was angry at the world for not caring about us.

I was angry at God.

Sometimes though I felt guilty for those thoughts and would pray extra to make up for them.

The anger grew inside me like a living thing.

It fed on every new death, every new destroyed building, every new family left homeless.

And there was always something new to feed it.

When I was 16, our building was hit.

We had warning.

Someone ran through shouting that we needed to evacuate.

Israeli jets had fired warning shots at the roof.

We had minutes to get out.

We ran down the stairs, my father carrying my youngest sister, my mother grabbing what she could.

We made it to the street just before the real missiles came.

I watched our home collapse into rubble and dust.

Everything we owned was inside.

my clothes, my school books, the photo albums with pictures of my grandparents, all of it gone in seconds.

We stayed with seconds relatives after that.

12 people crammed into three rooms.

My father tried to to start over, but his cart and all his vegetables had been in the storage room of our destroyed building.

He had nothing.

We had nothing.

That is when the men came to talk to me.

They were from Hamas.

They came to the mosque where I prayed.

They were always respectful.

They never pushed.

They just talked to me about dignity and resistance and faith.

They told me that Allah honored those who fought against oppression.

They told me that I could make a difference, that I could protect my people, that I could be more than just another victim.

I listened and slowly over months I began to believe them.

They started by giving me small tasks, delivering messages, standing watch, nothing dangerous at first.

They paid me a little money which I gave to my father.

They made me feel important like I mattered, like I was part of something bigger than myself.

By the time I was 18, I was fully committed.

I had been trained.

I had been taught and I had been given my specialty.

I was good with my hands.

I had always been good at taking things apart and putting them back together.

As a child, I used to fix broken radios and clocks for neighbors.

This skill, the men told me, could be used for the cause.

They taught me chemistry.

They taught me electronics.

They taught me how to build devices that would explode.

I became a bomb maker.

Looking back now, I can see how carefully they shaped my thinking, how they took my anger and my pain and my desire to matter and turned it into something they could use.

But at the time, I could not see it.

I thought I was choosing this path.

I thought I was serving God.

My workshop was beneath a residential building in the Shajaya neighborhood.

You reached it through a hidden entrance in a basement storage room.

The room below was small, maybe 4 m by 5 m.

It had a workbench, shelves with materials, and a ventilation system that brought in air from outside through hidden pipes.

I spent hours there, sometimes entire days.

The work required complete focus.

One wrong measurement, one careless moment, and I could blow myself up.

I lost two friends that way in the early years.

They made mistakes.

They died instantly.

I was careful.

I was precise.

I took my time and um I became known for my skill.

The devices I made were used in many operations.

I did not usually know the details.

Someone would give me specifications.

I would build what they asked for.

They would take it away.

Later I might hear about an explosion on the news, an Israeli checkpoint, a settlement, a military vehicle.

I would know that my work had been used.

I told myself that I was only targeting soldiers and settlers, combatants, people who had chosen to be part of the occupation.

I told myself this made it different, made it justified.

But I knew deep in a place I did not like to look that sometimes civilians died too.

Children sometimes I would feel a twinge of something uncomfortable when I heard about those deaths.

But I would push it away.

I would remind myself of Mahmud dying in the street, of my home being destroyed, of all the Palestinian children who had died.

I would tell myself that our cost was just and in war terrible things happen.

This is how you live with yourself.

When you do terrible things, you build walls in your mind.

You create justifications.

You stop thinking too deeply about certain questions.

I prayed five times a day.

I never missed a prayer.

Before I began work each day, I would pray and ask Allah to guide my hands.

I would recite verses from the Quran.

I believed completely that I was doing holy work.

On Fridays, I went to the mosque.

I listened to the sermons about jihad and paradise, about the rewards waiting for martyrs, about the evil of our enemies.

These sermons reinforced everything I believed.

They made me feel righteous.

I had respect in the community.

People knew I was involved in the resistance.

Though they did not know exactly what I did.

Men would nod to me in the street.

Older women would smile at me and call me a good Muslim boy.

Young men looked up to me.

I had purpose.

I had identity.

I had a place in the world.

When I was 23, I married Aliyah.

She was 19, beautiful with dark eyes and a gentle spirit.

She knew I was involved in the resistance.

Her brother was a fighter.

Her father had been killed in an is an an Israeli raid years before.

She understood the life.

We had a small wedding.

Everyone was happy despite the circumstances we lived under.

For one night, we forgot about the war and just celebrated.

Aliyah moved into the apartment I shared with my parents and siblings.

It was crowded, but we made it work.

A year later, our first child was born, a son.

We named him Tariq.

Then came our daughter, Leila, and then another son, Omar.

Those children were everything to me.

When I held my newborn son for the first time, I cried.

I promised him I would make the world better for him.

I promised I would fight so he could grow up free.

I loved being a father.

At home, I was not a fighter or a bumbo maker.

I was just Abu Tarik, the father who played with his children and made them laugh.

Tariq loved it when I would chase him around the apartment pretending to be a monster.

Ila would braid my short beard and giggle.

Little Omar would fall asleep on my chest while I read the Quran.

Aliyah was a good wife.

She made our crammed space feel like home.

She cooked good food with whatever we could afford.

She kept the children clean and well behaved.

She prayed constantly for my safety.

She worried about my work.

She knew it was dangerous.

Sometimes I would come home with burns on my hands from chemicals.

Once I was caught near an explosion when an Israeli strike hit nearby.

I came home covered in dust and blood that was not mine.

She cried and begged me to find other work.

But I would tell her this was my duty.

This was how I protected her and the children.

This was what Allah wanted from me.

She would nod and accept it.

But I could see the fear in her eyes every time I left.

I lived two lives.

At home, I was gentle and loving.

At work, I built machines of death.

I kept these two worlds completely separate in my mind.

I had to otherwise I do not think I could have continued.

The morning of the explosion started like any other morning.

I woke before dawn for fajar prayer.

The apartment was quiet except for Omar’s soft breathing.

He was sleeping between me and Aliyah.

I carefully moved him aside and got up.

I performed my ablutions in the small bathroom, washing my hands, face, arms, and feet.

The water was cold.

We rarely had hot water.

I did not mind.

I was used to it.

I prayed in the corner of the main room facing toward Mecca.

I recited the familiar words in Arabic, words I had said thousands of times before.

I asked Allah to protect my family, to give me strength, to accept my efforts, to grant me paradise.

After prayer, I sat and read from the Quran until the others began to wake.

Aliyah made breakfast, bread with olive oil and zatar, tea with too much sugar, the way I liked it.

The children ate quickly, excited about something that had happened at school a day before.

I was not really listening to their chatter.

I was thinking about the work ahead.

We had received materials for a new type of rocket.

It would fly farther and carry a larger payload than the ones we usually made.

The design was complex.

I had been studying the plans for days.

Today we would begin assembly.

Ila tugged on my sleeve.

She wanted me to look at a drawing she had made.

It was of our family, all stick figures holding hands.

She had drawn a big sun in the corner with a smiling face.

I told her it was beautiful.

I kissed her forehead.

She smelled like the cheap shampoo Aliyah used for the children’s hair.

I did not know that would be the last normal moment with my family.

When it was time to leave, I kissed each of my children.

Tar wanted me to stay and play.

Omar clung to my leg.

I had to peel him off gently.

Aliyah walked me to the door.

She looked at me with those worried eyes.

I touched her face and told her not to worry.

I told her I would be home for dinner.

I walked out into the street.

It was already hot.

Gaza is always hot in summer.

The air smelled like dust and the sea.

Though we were not close enough to see the water from our neighborhood.

I made my way through the streets toward the workshop.

I stopped at a small shop to buy cigarettes.

The owner asked about my family.

We talked for a few minutes about nothing important.

Then I continued on.

Two other men were already at the workshop when I arrived.

Hassan and Bilal.

Both were experienced fighters.

Hassan had been injured in a raid years before and walked with a limp.

Bilal was young, maybe 20, eager and sometimes too confident.

We greeted each other.

We joked a bit.

normal conversation.

Then we got to work.

The components were laid out on the workbench.

Metal tubes, wirings, circuit boards, containers of chemicals that had to be measured exactly.

We worked carefully and methodically.

This was not something you rushed.

I was focused on mixing the propellant compound.

This was the most dangerous part.

The chemicals had to be combined in a specific order at specific temperatures.

Too hot and they would ignite too fast and they would react unpredictably.

Hassan was working on the guidance system.

Bilal was preparing the warhead assembly.

We worked in silence, each concentrating on our tasks.

I was measuring out the second chemical when I felt something strange.

It is hard to explain.

A feeling in my chest, like a weight, like a pressure.

I paused and looked around.

Everything seemed normal.

Hassan and Bilal were working.

The ventilation fan was humming.

Nothing was wrong.

But the feeling did not go away.

I almost said something.

Almost suggested we take a break.

But I pushed the feeling aside.

We had work to finish.

I went back to my measurements.

I was pouring the chemical into the mixing container when Bilal spoke.

He said something about the wiring configuration.

Hassan answered him, “I was not paying attention to their words.

I was watching the chemical level in the container.

Then I saw the spark.

Just a tiny flash of light from Bilal’s workstation.

A small arc of electricity where there should not have been one.

I open my mouth to shout a warning, but the spark reached the primary charge before any sound left my throat.

The explosion was immediate and massive.

I remember light, blinding white light that filled everything.

I remember the sensation of being thrown backward.

I remember heat.

I remember the sound so loud it seemed to come from inside my own head rather than outside.

Then I remember hitting something hard.

The wall maybe or the floor.

Pain shot through my body.

Sharp intense pain everywhere at once.

I tried to breathe but could not.

There was dust and smoke and something burning.

I could not see, could not hear except for a highpitched ringing.

Could not move.

I thought this is it.

This is how I die.

I thought of Aliyah, of Tariq and Ila and Omar.

I thought they are waiting for me to come home for dinner.

I will not come home.

The pain started to fade.

Everything started to fade.

The heat, the smoke, the ringing, the light, all of it was fading away into darkness.

I felt myself letting go, sinking, falling into the darkness.

My last conscious thought was strange.

It was not about my family or my work or Allah or anything I expected.

It was just a simple observation almost curious.

So this is what dying feels like.

Then there was nothing.

Nothing at all.

Just darkness and silence and the sensation of falling forever into an empty void.

I was dead.

But I was not gone.

Not completely.

I became aware again.

But it was different from any awareness I had ever experienced.

I could think, but I had no body.

I could sense, but not with eyes or ears or any physical organ.

I existed but in a way I cannot properly explain in words.

The darkness was absolute, not like closing your eyes in a dark room.

Not like a moonless night.

This was darkness that seemed to have substance that seemed to press in from all sides that seemed alive somehow.

I tried to understand what was happening.

Was this death? Was this the transition? The Quran spoke about the time between death and resurrection.

I waited for something.

Angels perhaps, Monkar and Nakir, who were supposed to come and question the dead.

I waited for light or voices or anything that matched what I had been taught to expect.

Instead, I felt myself moving, being pulled downward, always downward.

The movement accelerated.

I was falling though I had nothing to fall with.

The sensation was sickening, terrifying.

I tried to stop it, to resist it, but I had no way to do that.

I had nobody to brace with, no hands to grab onto anything, no voice to cry out with.

The darkness changed.

It somehow became darker.

I did not think that was possible, but it did.

And with the deeper darkness came a smell.

Sulfur, rot, burning, all mixed together into something so foul it would have made me vomit if I still had a stomach.

And then I heard the screaming.

At first it was distant, like something carried on wind from far away.

But it grew louder as I fell.

Many voices, hundreds, thousands, all screaming, wailing, crying out in agony.

The sound was worse than the smell.

It was the sound of pure suffering, of hopeless, endless pain, of despair so complete there were no words adequate to describe it.

I wanted to cover my ears.

I wanted to shut it out, but I could not.

The screaming filled everything, filled me, became the only thing that existed beside the darkness and the falling.

Then the falling stopped.

I was somewhere.

I had arrived.

But where? Slowly something like vision returned to me.

I could see though I do not know how or with what.

The darkness receded just enough that I could make out shapes.

landscape, other figures.

What I saw froze something inside me.

I was standing on cracked, barren ground that seemed to stretch forever in all directions.

The earth, if you could call it that, was black and broken.

Cracks ran through it like wounds, and from these cracks came orange and red light.

Fire.

Everything was lit by fire, burning beneath the surface.

The heat was unbearable.

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