Arabgazette Arabgazette Magazine
Related Articles
March 11, 2023
Fadia Abdallah
Dalal Al-Maghribi, the bride of Jaffa, 45 years since your martyrdom.
Today marks the 45th anniversary of the martyrdom of the young Palestinian activist, Dalal Al-Maghribi, nicknamed “The Bride of Jaffa,” whom the Syrian national poet Nizar Qabbani said she “established the Palestinian Republic.”
Dalal was born in 1958 in one of the Palestinian camps in Beirut. She is the daughter of a family from Jaffa who sought refuge in Lebanon after the Nakba of 1948. Then she studied elementary and middle school in schools affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the camp.
She decided to join the Palestinian revolution and work in the ranks of the fedayeen in the “Fatah” movement while she was still in school. She received many military training and courses in guerrilla warfare, during which she was trained on different types of weapons. During these courses, she was known for her courage, patriotism, and devotion to Palestine.
The Assassination of 3 Fatah Leaders
The assassination of the three leaders; Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser, and Abu Yusef al-Najjar at the hands of the Israeli Mossad in 1973 had a severe impact on Dalal, and the constant and abhorrent aggression that the Palestinian camps were subjected to left her with a sense of bitterness, as well as the misery that her family and the rest of the residents of the camp experienced as a result of their forced displacement by the Israeli occupation of her country, Palestine. Therefore, Dalal, like the rest of her peers and her comrades in the camps, began to experience strong feelings of anger, which generated a determination to take revenge on the enemy.
Deir Yassin brigade
The Deir Yassin brigade put the plan in place by the martyr Commander Khalil Al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), and it was based on carrying out a landing operation on the Palestinian beach, taking control of a military bus, and heading to Jerusalem to attack the Israeli Parliament building (the Knesset). At the age of twenty, Dalal was assigned as the leader of the operation with a group of ten fedayeen. The operation was known as Operation “Kamal Adwan” and the division was called “Deir Yassin”.
Operation day
On the morning of March 11, 1978, Dalal got off with her squad from a boat that landed on the Palestinian Middeteranian coast. The group boarded the two boats, and the landing and arrival operation succeeded without being discovered by the Israelis.
Dalal and her squad succeeded in reaching Tel Aviv and seizing a bus of soldiers with all its passengers, and the squad clashed with other Israeli elements outside the bus.
The flag of Palestine and Dalal’s “Republic”.
Dalal told the hostages, “We do not want to kill you. We are only holding you, hostage, in order to free our brothers who are detained in the prisons of your alleged state from the clutches of captivity.” Then she took out the Palestinian flag from her bag and hung it inside the bus while chanting the national song: “My country, my country, you have my love and my heart. Palestine, the land of ancestors, we must return back to you.”
Poet Nizar Qabbani said about her, “Dalal established the Palestinian Republic and raised the Palestinian flag. It is not important how old this republic is. What is important is that the Palestinian flag was raised in the depths of the occupied land on a 95-kilometer-long road on the main highway in Palestine.” Thus, Dalal formed a special case in the resistance.
Occupation losses
This operation led to hundreds of deaths and injuries on the Israeli side. In light of the high losses, the Israeli government commissioned a special army squad led by the former Minister of the Occupation Army, Ehud Barak, to stop the bus and kill and arrest its passengers, as planes and tanks were used to besiege the fedayeen.
This prompted Dalal al-Mughrabi to blow up the bus and its passengers, killing the Israeli soldiers. When the ammunition ran out, Barak ordered all the 13 fedayeen fighters to be killed with machine guns, so they were all martyred except for one who was captured after being wounded.
Barak appeared before the photographers polling Dalal by her hair and kicking her after she was killed. On the second day of the operation, the head of the occupation government at the time, Menachem Begin, admitted that 37 Israelis had been killed and 86 wounded, but he did not disclose the number of dead Israeli soldiers.
Barak appeared before the photographers while dragging Dalal from her hair and kicking her dead body.
The last commandment
Before her martyrdom, Dalal left a will in her handwriting to the Palestinians, stating: “My will to all of you freedom fighters is to put aside all secondary contradictions, escalating the main contradiction, directing all guns at the Zionist enemy, and protecting the Palestinian independence decision with the guns of the revolutionaries of all factions.”
And she continued, “I urge all my brothers, wherever they are to continue on the same path that we took.” It is noteworthy that the Israeli occupation authorities are still holding the body of the martyr Dalal al-Mughrabi in the “Numbers Cemetery.”
Dalal – even after 44 years of her martyrdom- continues to haunt the occupation, whose government submitted a complaint to the United Nations in 2016 condemning the Palestinian Authority for celebrating the anniversary of the martyrdom of the freedom fighter.
Dalal is one of the few martyrs who remained present in the Palestinian memory despite the passage of all this time since her martyrdom along with her comrades in the famous operation.
