Thousands mourn Deif’s wife, son in Gaza

Several thousand mourners join the funeral procession for the wife and baby son of Hamas’s military commander Muhammad Deif, angrily demanding revenge against Israel.

Firing Kalashnikovs into the air, they carry the bodies of 27-year-old Widad and her seven-month-old son Ali, who were killed in an airstrike on Gaza City last night.

The two bodies are wrapped in green Hamas flags as they are carried from the mosque to the cemetery in Jabaliya refugee camp. Mourners also carry the flag-wrapped bodies of two men killed in an airstrike earlier today on a motorcycle, both presumed Hamas militants.

“Revenge, revenge, revenge,” shouts the crowd as they walk toward the cemetery waving Hamas flags and denouncing the killing of the second wife and infant son of Deif, head of the Qassam Brigades.

“I’m like all the other people in the Gaza Strip. I am no different from the others who have lost children. This is like a tsunami,” says Widad’s angry father, Mustafa Harb Asfura, 56.

When his university-educated daughter married Deif seven years ago, her father feared it was a death sentence.

“My daughter knew she would die a martyr when she decided to marry Muhammad Deif. Every moment since then I’ve been expecting to hear that she has died,” he says.

Asfura says he had only seen his son-in-law once, when the couple married.

After that, he didn’t even know where his daughter was living, such is the secrecy that surrounds Deif in his determination to avoid detection by Israel.

Widad and Deif had two daughters and a son together. She also had two sons from a first marriage, the family says.

— AFP, Times of Israel staff