Gaza Strip: Murder of Gaza Christian Unresolved As Threats Continue

Widow of Rami Ayyad gives birth in Gaza hospital.

ICC Note

“ Gaza has no courts, no lawyers, no prosecutors, no proper detention centers. We hear lots of rumors. But it’s hard to believe that Hamas does not know who killed Rami.”

February 15 Palestine (Compass Direct News) – Palestinian Christian widow Pauline Ayyad gave birth in Gaza last week to a healthy little girl, four months after the tiny infant’s father was kidnapped and shot to death by Islamist radicals still at large.

Rami Ayyad, 29, was serving as manager of the Palestinian Bible Society bookshop in Gaza when he was found murdered on October 7 last year.

Ayyad’s family has yet to receive any concrete information on the investigation that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh ordered vowing to bring the Christian’s murderers to justice.

“At the beginning, the Hamas authorities told us they had found the car Rami was taken in, and also the people who were in the car with him,” Pauline Ayyad told Compass. “They said they hadn’t captured the driver yet, but they knew his name. And we heard that the murderer had confessed, and the case was being taken to the National Internal Security officials.”

But the widow said that a week later, “We started to hear all kinds of contradictions. They claimed they hadn’t captured anyone, and that they just had suspicions to go on.”

Several weeks later, security officials within Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah organization accused Ashraf Abu Layla of being behind Ayyad’s assassination. Abu Layla is the central Gaza chief of Izz al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, the so-called “military wing” of Hamas dedicated to enforcing Islamic law in the Strip.

Other rumors circulated that that the murderer was indeed a Hamas operative who was jailed for three weeks, and then shipped off in exile to Saudi Arabia .

“Who knows?” admitted one Palestinian Christian. “ Gaza has no courts, no lawyers, no prosecutors, no proper detention centers. We hear lots of rumors. But it’s hard to believe that Hamas does not know who killed Rami.”

His widow was clear that she wants to know the facts.

“It is very important to me for them to discover these people, to learn who they are and why they killed him,” she said. “I want to know what happened in those hours, from 4 in the afternoon when they kidnapped him until his body was found on the street at 2 the next morning.”

She added, “We don’t want compensation. We want to know the details.”

Evacuated Staff in Limbo

After Ayyad’s murder, Hamas authorities admitted they could not guarantee the safety of local Bible Society staff and their families, who were continuing to receive threats. So when Israeli authorities eventually issued them permits to leave Gaza temporarily, seven of the families evacuated to the West Bank .

Two of the families have identity papers allowing them to move freely around the West Bank and into Jerusalem , but the others are restricted to the city limits of Bethlehem . And they must apply to renew their temporary Israeli permits every few weeks.

Arriving with just a few suitcases of clothes, the families rented sparsely furnished apartments in Bethlehem . In the meantime, they are exploring their options if indeed it remains unsafe to return to Gaza . And they continue to receive trauma counseling as they wrestle with Ayyad’s death and their own uncertain futures.

All but one of the 14 children of these seven families are 4 years old or younger.

“Our children are missing their own homes and toys, but even more their grandparents and our extended families,” admitted one staff member father. “We were all born and raised in Gaza ,” one Bible Society staff member told Compass. “But now we have to be so careful if we stay there, just to protect our lives.”

He added that his wife is pregnant. “So if the baby would come during the night, we would have to have an armed guard to escort us to the hospital!” he said. “It’s no life to just stay locked in our homes all the time. So we preferred to leave for now.”

Despite his more secure and comfortable life in the West Bank, he admitted he greatly missed the busy challenges of active ministry in his work and church back in Gaza .

“My father helped me and my brothers build our homes adjacent to each other, so we could all be close together,” he said. “But now he cries when he calls me, telling us not to come back to Gaza .”

“We feel real pressures now between the Muslims and Christians in Gaza ,” another evacuated staffer said. “Many of the Muslims believe that Rami was evangelizing people so it was OK to kill him.”

Late the night before, he said, he had received a telephone call from a Christian family in Gaza , saying that one of their children had just answered the intercom when it buzzed from downstairs at the street level.

“Two people spoke over the intercom, telling the child they were going to kill his father,” he said.

Although the family called the police who posted guards outside the house, they were unable to sleep for the rest of the night, he said.

“The time for paying the ultimate price in Gaza is now,” Palestinian Bible Society director Labib Madanat told Compass. “God saw the Palestinian Bible Society worthy to bear this trial and honor, the martyrdom of our brother Rami.”

Gesturing to large posters of the slain Palestinian Christian posted at the entrance and on the walls of the Bible Society’s Jerusalem office, Madanat said, “He was not a victim. He was a hero.”

Ayyad’s widow is also a hero, Madanat added. “She would like to stay and continue Rami’s ministry there in Gaza ,” he said.

But that is becoming more and more difficult, as dramatized by today’s vicious attack against still another Christian institution in Gaza .

In the wee hours this morning, 14 masked gunmen bombed the YMCA library, destroying thousands of books and briefly kidnapping two security guards. A second explosive planted in the compound’s administrative offices failed to detonate.

Hamas police officials have declined comment on the incident, and so far no group has claimed responsibility.

Birth of Sama

Pauline Ayyad named her new daughter Sama (meaning “heaven” in Arabic), “because her father is in heaven,” Ayyad explained to Compass. The couple already had two young sons – George, who will be 3 in March, and Wissam, 14 months.

Weighing in at just four pounds (1.8 kilos) on the morning of February 4, little Sama was kept in an incubator for her first 48 hours, after which she and her mother were released from the hospital.

Ayyad and her sons had been allowed by Israeli authorities, who still control the Gaza Strip’s borders and supplies, to leave the Hamas-ruled territory and stay in Bethlehem from mid-November through December. Then she returned to Gaza after Christmas to live near her parents during the baby’s delivery, which was expected to require a caesarean section.

But Gaza ’s unstable situation deteriorated even further in mid-January, when Israel cut off electricity supplies into the Strip in reaction to Palestinian missile launchings into Israel . With local hospitals unable to guarantee electricity or other basic supplies, the widow applied for an exit permit to return to the West Bank for the baby’s birth.

But the Israeli government denied her request. In the end, baby Sama arrived a week earlier than expected, and a local maternity hospital was equipped with necessary supplies for her natural birth.

Fellow Christians outside Gaza are hoping to visit the Ayyad family regularly to bring in unavailable items such as milk powder and even candles, with the sporadic availability of electricity.

END

Side Bar

Ayyad Inspired by Malatya Martyrs in Turkey

When news came to Gaza of the Turkish massacre of three Christians in Malatya on April 18 of last year, Palestinian Bible Society director Labib Madanat was visiting Rami Ayyad and his bookshop staff in Gaza City .

The three Christians in Turkey , two Turkish converts from Islam and their German colleague, were tortured for several hours in the office of a Christian publishing company and then killed with butcher knives by five young Turkish Muslims who accused them of “attacking our religion.”

After the Gaza bookshop staff stopped and prayed together for the bereaved families in Malatya and all the churches of Turkey , Ayyad spoke out to his colleagues.

“Rami just looked at us and said, ‘What a glory to God this was, how they died for Jesus!’ Madanat recalled. “Then he said, ‘I wish I could die that way, such a noble death.’”

Some four months later, Madanat said, Ayyad was deeply saddened over the kidnap and conversion to Islam of a single woman from Gaza’s tiny Christian community, now fewer than 3,000 among Gaza’s 1.4 million Muslim residents.

Professor Sana’a al-Sayegh was head of the Science and Technology Department at Palestinian International University and held Gaza ’s only female doctorate in her field.

In her mid-30s, Al-Sayegh went missing on June 24 of last year. Her family said she telephoned them five days later, saying that she was being held against her will and pressured to marry a Muslim professor in her university.

Some weeks later she sent word to her family, urging them not to try to find her, “for your safety and mine.”

Eventually, she appeared in August alongside her new husband, pregnant and with her head covered, declaring that she had converted to Islam. The daughter of the mukhtar (official representative) of Gaza ’s Christians, Al-Sayegh was a member of the Greek Orthodox Church.

After Al-Sayegh’s story become public, Ayyad commented to his colleagues, “How I pray I would never deny Jesus.”

While Ayyad’s prayer was answered that he would “remain faithful unto death,” Madanat said, a number of other Palestinian believers now face similar death threats.

“We were looking for a safe place to baptize five Muslim-background believers when we heard about Rami’s assassination,” a Palestinian convert told Compass from Jerusalem . “So we stopped and asked ourselves, ‘Should we go ahead and do this now?’”

But all five believers refused to delay their baptisms, declaring, “We are ready to die for Christ too!” One convert commented, “If one Rami went to heaven from Gaza , there will be 10 Ramis here in the West Bank !”

During 2007, several Palestinian Muslims who converted to Christianity went into hiding on the West Bank because of direct threats from Muslim extremists.