Researcher Mahmoud Nammourah: ‘Israel’ demolished his library, arrested his sons, prevented him from filing lawsuit
"When I told the officer that I will file a lawsuit before the ICC he pointed his weapon at me and said: I am, only, the justice here".
Occupied Hebron (QNN)- “Home is not only stones but its also memories”, this is how Mahmoud Talab Nammourah describes the scale of loss that he suffered after the occupation state bombed his house in Dura in southern Hebron during the second Intifada.
18 years ago, the Israeli army surrounded Nammourah’s house and demolished it then prevented him from filing an ICC lawsuit.
“I told the officer, who was accompanying the force that demolished my house, that I will file an ICC lawsuit. He pointed his weapon at me and said: I am, only, the justice here”, Nammourah recalls.
Under the ruins of his house, he lost his most precious possession; his library, which contained over 5000 books in addition to newspapers from the Egyptian and Turkish archives.
That wasn’t the only suffering he endured at the time as the Israelis also arrested his sons Anees and Akram and sentenced them to life imprisonment.
Both Anees and Akram got their freedom back during the prisoner exchange in 2011, fulfilling the dream of their parents to see them free. The mother’s only wish to embrace her sons before she dies finally came true.
“I went along with my wife to Jordan, Egypt, Sinai and then finally to Gaza. We suffered a lot, especially that we were both sick and my wife was in a wheelchair”, said Nammourah.
“At the border crossing, Akram met us. When his mother saw him she was so happy that she stood and ran for 20 meters to hug him, leaving the wheelchair behind”, Nammourah recalls.
“After one week of meeting and finally hugging her sons in Gaza, Huda Nammourah passed away in Gaza and was buried in Dura.”
Another suffering engulfed Mahmoud’s life when his son Hazem (30 years old) died after donating his kidney to his brother Anees, who in his turn was suffering due to the medical negligence in Israeli jails.
“Hazem died too young, leaving his children and pregnant wife behind after Huda died and left me struggling”, he said.
Nammourah was in Gaza during the Israeli aggression in 2014. The visit, which was supposed to be a happy event, as Nammourah went to attend his son’s wedding, turned out into a documentation visit, in which he documented all the Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Although of all the suffering, Nammourah is doing his best to continue his researches and expose the crimes of the occupation state.
Nammourah worked as a principal of a school in his home town. He also worked as Palestine’s representative at the UNESCO. He has several published works such as “Islam, The West, and Palestine”, “Folklore in Rural Palestine” and “Palestine’s Maligned History”.
