Last Night In Tammun

Eid shopping in Ireland. Death on the roads of Tammun. One moment, two worlds, and the names we carry in silence.

11 AM Dublin, 1 PM Tammun, Occupied Palestine

The mall in Ireland does not know it is Ramadan. There are no lanterns hanging from the ceiling or dates displayed near the checkout. Instead there are cardboard bunnies and pastel eggs because Easter is almost here. The colors overlap in a way that makes our Eid shopping feel extra special.

The girls skipped through the shops in joy while we dragged our feet in exhaustion. Both my children and my cousin’s daughter, the one I had begged to join us, held their Eid dresses up against the fluorescent lights.

My cousin watched us with a quiet intensity. She is brilliant and stubbornly unwilling to be a burden on anyone. When she reluctantly agreed to this trip, she wanted to give her daughter a normal day in a country far from home, where our holidays are invisible and we borrow the visibility of theirs.

I handed her the bag with her daughter’s new dress and my tongue slipped.I called the girl by her dead sister’s name.

Just like that, I saw the light behind the mother’s eyes dim, not with a scream, but with a slow fizzle as happiness drained from the space between us.

The name belongs to a house full of ghosts. Her husband was my childhood friend and the love of her life. An Israeli drone missile killed him and their five-year-old daughter as they fled Gaza in the early days of the genocide.

Now his widow stands in a cold mall in Ireland buying clothes for the child who survived.She is safe here. Yet the same tradition of buying Eid clothes, has become a death sentence elsewhere.

Last night in Tammun, south of Tubas in the occupied West Bank, Israeli occupation forces executed another family who were also returning from buying Eid outfits because the tradition that is supposed to be sacred has become a death sentence under occupation.

Ali Khaled Bani Odeh, thirty-seven, and his wife Waad Othman Bani Odeh, thirty-five, were shot in the head alongside their two sons Mohammed, five, and Othman, seven, as they drove home with bags of new clothes in the back seat.

Their other two children, Mustafa, eight, and Khaled, eleven, survived with shrapnel wounds to their heads and faces. Israeli soldiers pulled them from the vehicle and beat them while interrogating them.

One of the soldiers shouted, “We killed dogs,” as Khaled later recounted from his hospital bed. He remembered hearing his mother crying “Khalas, enough” and his father praying before silence fell after the shots sprayed the car.

This is not a story about chaos or confusion, it is about genocide.

Weapons arrive on schedule, military assaults are planned, crossings close as dictated, and the world calls this complicated, yet the rubble is perfectly clear about who is being targeted and why. Here I slipped on a word. There, they slipped on a road under fire.

Far away from Tammun, the mall continued as if nothing had happened. My cousin joked about shopping during Ramadan being torture while fasting, then laughed as the girls hugged their new outfits.

We walked to the car. The Irish air was cold against our faces. I thought about how in Gaza parents cannot buy clothes at all. In the West Bank, soldiers shoot them for trying. Israeli soldiers beat their surviving children in the aftermath.

In Ireland, we carry the guilt of surviving. We carry the weight of names we cannot say without breaking something inside the people we love. I wanted to apologize for the name, but I did not. The words stuck in my throat.

Words feel heavy when the ground is shaking elsewhere. She knows I did not mean it. She knows the name lives in all of us. She knows who is absent from this celebration.

We put the bags in the trunk, the plastic rustled. She smiled then closed the door.

We drove home under streetlights that do not know the difference between Easter and Eid.Between the names we speak and the names we carry in silence. Behind us, bright-colored pastel eggs and cardboard bunnies remained. The mall in Ireland still does not know it is Ramadan.