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.

I felt like I was inside an oven surrounded by flames, but somehow not burning, just suffering the heat without end.

And everywhere in every direction were people, thousands upon thousands of people, maybe millions, all in various states of torment.

Some were wandering aimlessly, their faces twisted in anguish.

Some were on the ground writhing.

Some were reaching upward, crying out for help that did not come.

Some were completely still, frozen in expressions of horror.

I wanted to deny what I was seeing.

I wanted it to be a dream, a hallucination from the explosion, anything but reality.

But I knew deep in whatever I was now, I knew exactly where I was.

This was hell.

Not the metaphorical hell that some modern scholars talked about.

Not a temporary state of purification.

This was the real hell.

The hell that the prophets warned about.

The hell that I had heard about since childhood but never really believed was literal.

And I was there.

The realization hit me like a physical blow.

Terror flooded through me.

pure absolute terror unlike anything I had ever felt in life because I understood what this meant.

This was forever.

This was eternity.

This was where I would stay in this heat and darkness and suffering for all time with no end.

I tried to scream but I could not make a sound come out.

I tried to run but I could not move.

I was frozen there, surrounded by countless others in the same state.

Then I started to recognize faces.

Not far from me, I saw Khaled.

He had been a fighter in Hamas, killed in an Israeli air strike three years before.

We had held a big funeral for him.

The Imam had spoken about him being a martyr, about him being in paradise with the other righteous ones.

We had all believed it.

But he was here, not in paradise.

Here in this place of torment.

His face was twisted in agony.

He was crying out, but no sound reached me.

He looked at me and our eyes met.

The recognition in his eyes was clear.

And there was something else there.

Desperation.

He was trying to tell me something.

I moved toward him.

I do not know how.

I simply moved and the distance between us closed.

When I was near him, I could hear his voice.

It was horsearo and broken like he had been screaming forever.

He said, “We were deceived.

All of us.

We were all deceived.

” I tried to ask him what he meant, but he continued as if he could not hear me.

As if he was simply repeating words he had said countless times before.

He said, “There are no rewards here.

No rivers, no gardens, no virgins, nothing we were promised.

Only this, only suffering, only fire and darkness, and no hope of it ever ending.

” He reached toward me, but could not touch me.

His hand passed through where I was as if I was not solid.

He said, “Tell them.

” You have to tell them.

Tell everyone it’s not too late for them but it is too late for us.

Tell them about Jesus.

Only Jesus.

We were wrong about everything.

I did not understand Jesus.

Why was he talking about Jesus? Jesus was a prophet, a good man, but not the way to salvation.

That was what I had always been taught.

But before I could form a question, Khaled was pulled away.

Something dragged him backward into the darkness, still crying outwards, I could no longer hear, I looked around frantically.

Everywhere I looked, I saw people I recognized, fellow fighters, men I had prayed beside in the mosque, people who had died as martyrs for the cause.

And they were all here, all suffering, all in torment.

I saw Muhammad who had blown himself up at a checkpoint taking three Israeli soldiers with him.

I saw Rashid who had been shot during a raid on a settlement.

I saw Farukq who had spent his whole adult life fighting for Palestinian liberation and died of his wounds in a safe house.

All martyrs, all believers, all here.

I saw clerics too.

Religious men I had respected, shakes who had taught me about Islam, imams who had led prayers and given sermons, men who had spent their lives studying the Quran and hadith.

They were here too.

One of them saw me and rushed toward me with a speed that was unnatural.

It was Sheik Hassan, a man who had been famous throughout Gaza for his knowledge and piety.

He had died two years before I did.

I had attended his funeral.

Thousands had mourned him.

His face was different from the others.

Not just anguish, but something else.

Guilt.

Overwhelming guilt that seemed to radiate from him.

When he reached me, he grabbed at me with hands that passed through my form.

He spoke in a rush, words stumbling over each other in desperate haste.

He said, “I taught thousands.

Thousands.

They listened to me.

They believed me.

And I taught them lies.

Not intentionally.

I believed it too.

But I was wrong.

And now they will all come here because of what I taught them.

” As I see them arriving day after day.

people I taught, people who trusted me and they end up here because of my words.

He was weeping.

Tears ran down his face and evaporated in the heat before they could fall.

He said, “Tell them I was wrong.

Tell them to ignore everything.

” I said, “Tell them about Jesus.

He is the only way, the only truth, the only life.

” We were wrong about him.

So wrong.

Tell them please.

You have to tell them.

Then he too was pulled away.

Still crying out.

I tried to process what I was hearing.

These men, these righteous fighters and scholars, they were all saying the same thing.

They were all talking about Jesus.

They were all saying we had been wrong.

But how could we have been wrong? Islam was the final revelation.

Muhammad was the final prophet.

The Quran was the perfect word of God.

I had built my entire life on these truths.

More souls crowded around me, not touching but near, all trying to speak to me, all trying to give me the same message.

A woman I did not recognize pushed forward.

She was crying hysterically.

She said, “I died last year.

I was devout my whole life.

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