Mohammed Attiya Abu Warda, Abu Hamza, 48 years old, enters his 22nd year in occupation prisons today, 4 November 2024. A resistance struggler with the Ezz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, he was seized by Zionist occupation forces on 4 November 2002 — amid the Al-Aqsa Intifada — and sentenced to 48 life sentences. This means that he is serving the third-highest sentence in Zionist jails, after Abdullah Barghouti and Ibrahim Hamed, and equal to that of Hassan Salameh, and is one of the prisoners with high sentences whose release is a key demand of the Palestinian resistance in a prisoner exchange.
Abu Warda, born on 17 January 1976, is a Palestinian refugee born in Al-Fawwar refugee camp in Dura, al-Khalil, occupied Palestine. His family is originally from ‘Iraq al-Manshiyya, forced from their homes and lands during al-Nakba. After attending the Sharia school in al-Khalil, he attended Bethlehem University and Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, studying physics, before switching to study education at the Dar Al-Mu’allimin College Faculty of Educational Sciences in Ramallah. While studying, he worked as a construction laborer and often dedicated his earnings to the expenses of organizing student activities.
His earliest political engagement was with the Fateh movement during the great popular Intifada and was first arrested by the occupation in 1992 and served three months in Zionist prisons at the age of 15 for throwing stones and empty bottles at the occupation soldiers stationed by the camp. When he was released, he later joined the Hamas movement, and his commitment to participating in the armed resistance escalated and he became part of the Qassam Brigades. He participated in planning and organizing several martyrdom operations carried out by the armed wing of Hamas following the Zionist assassination of Yahya Ayyash, the engineer of the resistance, in 1996.
As part of the Palestinian Authority’s “security coordination” with the Zionist regime, he was first kidnapped by the PA’s “Preventive Security Force,” which was designed to pursue and repress the Palestinian resistance in the interests of protecting the Zionist project in occupied Palestine. He was convicted by a sham PA court — much like that created for use against Ahmad Sa’adat and his comrades — and sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour. During the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2002, he was transferred to the PA prison in al-Khalil, from which he was able to escape, only to be re-arrested several months later; as the Zionists invaded the city of al-Khalil with massive military assaults, he was released and began his life as a fugitive from the occupation.
During his time in PA prisons, he married Noura Burhan al-Ja’bari — who he had met during his time outside the prison — and they had their only child, Hamza, while he was wanted by the occupation forces. They lived together for only two months of marriage, moving in disguise and never being seen in public — before multiple months of separation, where Mohammed stayed away from Noura in order to protect her as he was being pursued for imprisonment or assassination. Noura al-Ja’bari, a teacher at a school in al-Khalil, was herself arrested and imprisoned by the occupation in 2012, including being held for a full month under harsh interrogation, which she describes as the most difficult time in her life, as she was kept from her son Hamza. As a student, she was very active in activities on campus, and she is continually present at events to support the prisoners held in Zionist jails and demand their freedom, as well as to demand an end to the PA’s political imprisonment and “security coordination” with the occupation.
During his time in prison, Abu Warda has been an active part of the prisoners’ movement, participating in and leading several hunger strikes and other collective actions, including the 2012 collective Karameh strike.
The occupation forces refused to release him, along with multiple other prisoners with lengthy sentences, as part of the Wafa’ al-Ahrar prisoner exchange achieved by the Palestinian resistance in 2011.
From his prison cell, in 2016, Mohammed Abu Warda wrote a series of notes on his life, published at Dunia al-Watan. An English translation follows:
Birth: With the elders who were forced from ‘Iraq Al-Manshiyya, and with the scent of blood that overflowed from the bodies of our ancestors, leaving behind memories burdened and scattered by the hand of the occupier among the diaspora camps, and with the shouts of the deprived children who grew up in the camps, joy dawned on my grandmother’s face as she saw my mother on the day of my birth, announcing my arrival on the 17th of January 1976, to hand me the UNRWA ration card, which remained with us for a long time in Al-Fawwar camp, which boils over with the anger of its people over the anguish of displacement that scattered them in 1948, as the announcement of my birth was marked on the path of continuous refugeehood for the children of our people.
Upbringing: I grew up in the narrow alleys of the camp crowded with its people, and in my mother’s embrace, whom God honored me with, keen to breastfeed me with the milk of freedom and rebellion against the occupation’s oppression and tyranny. She had a prominent and important role in raising me and encouraging me to pray in the mosque since my childhood, and teaching me to memorize some verses from the Holy Qur’an. I clung to the life of the camp despite its harshness, playing on its soil and among its closely packed homes. I breathed in the fragrance of its air, I ran on the mats of its mosque until my feet gradually led me year by year towards its schools, which seemed more like illusions than reality. During the Intifada of Stones, we grew up carrying stones in our bags to confront the brutality of the army stationed by our camp at their points of concentration. We grew up with the stones, the bullets of the army, and the slogans that my little hands wrote on the walls, wrapped in the scarf of the Palestinian Liberation Movement – Fateh – earning me the title of “the little Fateh sheikh.” This persisted until my first arrest in In 1992, which lasted for 3 months. I resumed the same path after liberation, but with a new vision, whose transformations began at the hands of Sheikh Kamal al-Titi (Abu Sayyaf) and the blessed Sharia school in al-Khalil, and its honorable teachers who introduce me to the ranks of the Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas – in addition to the role of its students, headed by Abbas al-Oweiwi and the martyr Raed Misk. The journey continued to the College of Educational Sciences in the city of Ramallah and the former Teachers’ Institute, where I embraced the Islamic Bloc in the years between 1993 and 1996, moving between most of its committees and becoming its leader. This was the most important turning point in my life, in which I practiced my role as an activist in the ranks of the Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas – and all its activities inside and outside the institute, until the news of the martyrdom of Engineer Yahya Ayyash, the engineer of the Qassam Brigades in the West Bank, came. His martyrdom would be a new station marking a significant step for my involvement with the blessed Qassam Brigades.
Jihadist Work: After I had the honor of belonging to the Qassam Brigades in the Faculty of Educational Sciences, introduced by one of the brothers from Gaza, who in turn introduced me to the brother, the prisoner Hassan Salameh, who was one of the Qassam leaders in Gaza, and who came to the West Bank to organize the operations of revenge for the blood of the engineer Yahya Ayyash. My introduction to the prisoner Hassan Salameh was the real beginning of my activity in the Qassam Brigades, and among our most important operations were:
1- The first response operation in revenge for the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, on February 25, 1996, carried out by the martyr Majdi Mohammed Mahmoud Abu Warda from Al-Fawwar camp, in the city of Jerusalem on Street 18, and resulted in the killing of 26 Zionists and wounding of dozens more, as he detonated himself on a passenger bus. My role in it was to organize the martyr and bring him to the leader Hassan Salameh.
2- The second response operation, on the same day, was carried out by the martyr Ibrahim Hassan Sarahneh from Al-Fawwar camp, in the occupied city of Asqelan, and resulted in the death of a Zionist and the wounding of dozens.
3- The third operation was a week after the previous ones, also in Jerusalem, also on Street 18, carried out by the martyr Raed Abdel-Karim Al-Sharnoubi from Burqa, Nablus, and resulted in the death of 18 Zionists and the wounding of dozens.
4- An attempt to send a fourth martyr during the Al-Aqsa Intifada after my release from the Palestinian security services’ prison in 2001, but God’s will did not allow it to succeed.
Arrest: The Palestinian Authority’s security forces seized me in March of the same year, and I was taken to its prisons and interrogation centers in the city of Jericho. I was convicted of these operations in a mock trial and sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour, thus beginning a journey of suffering and pain in the heat of Jericho that continued for five and a half years, awaiting the day of freedom and salvation. At the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, in which the Palestinian Authority lost its control over the cities of the West Bank due to the invasions, fate took me back to the city of al-Khalil, hoping to breathe the air of our camp (Al-Fawwar camp) after years of separation. However, the Preventive Security Service re-arrested me again, keeping me imprisoned for another four months, until the al-Khalil invasion began in April 2002, and I was released to a life of pursuit and persecution by the Israeli army.
Marital status: Displacement, the bitterness of the Intifada of Stones, and imprisonment left me no room for love and marriage. However, after I left Jericho prison and came to the city of al-Khalil in search of the air of the camp, which the security forces had prevented me from accessing, fate brought me a different breeze from the heart of Hebron University, the breeze of the woman I loved and who became my inevitable fate, and a life project that compensated for the bitterness and cruelty of the years of prison. The sight of her scattered aside the harsheness of prison, awakening love in my desolate life and inspiring a song as joyous of that of a nightingale.
Yet, once again, this song was cut short by the prison bars of the Authority, for her to begin with me a life of love wrapped in the thorns of the prison and its barbed wires. I spent the period of rosy dreams of engagement in the Preventive Security prison, and I married her among the soldiers of the security services and the prison guards. I left their prison to the wedding hall that contained nothing but the bride and the soldiers, I finished the wedding ceremony by returning to my room in the PA prison, I stole a few hours to visit her like a deprived eye glimpsing the moon, until the city was invaded and she lived with me amid the harsh period of pursuit by the occupation. During that time, God blessed me with a child, whom I named Hamza, as an extension of me and her and the bringing of together two hearts that were united in that marriage for only a few short days.
Life Under Pursuit: My life on the run began with the invasion of the city of al-Khalil and continued for 3 months, filled with more suffering and harsh scenes until my final arrest in November 2002.
Prison life: Life folds into chapters of separation known only to those who have lived it, longing for a wife who lived with me for days and separated from me for years, a son who was born, lived, and grown without ever feeling my touch or embrace, and for a family deprived of their home and their reunion on even one occasion. But God’s decree of trial is for his beloved ones, and I pray to be among them and to help me to remain steadfast in His destiny, and to adhere to His religion and learn His book, and to patiently grow in the circles of knowledge that accompany me on my journey of suffering. As for the people who affected me the most through their words and books, they are Sheikh Ahmed Al-Qattan, one of the prominent figures in the Hamas movement and one of the teachers of the Sharia school, along with the martyrs Kamal Al-Titi, Abdullah Al-Qawasmi, and Abdel-Majid Dudin.
