A Martyr Does Not Die

Saif al-Din Musalat, the Martyrs, and the Value of Palestinian life

Today, we will gather. In the community center where we have prayed, laughed, argued, and learned to mourn together, we will sit on folding chairs beneath fluorescent lights and whisper al-Fatiha for a boy many of us barely knew. Some will remember passing him at weddings, offering a nod, or seeing his name on a youth program flyer years ago. But his absence now feels like a family limb severed. His name—Sayfollah (Saif) al-Din Musalat—is ours to carry. He was twenty, Palestinian-American, beaten to death by settlers while trying to defend his land in the hills of al-Mazra'a.

May Our Martyrs be Victors in Eternal Paradise. Saif, is pictured in the bottom left. Amer Rabee to his right. Hajj Kamel Jawad on the top right. And 6 year old Wadea on the top left.

The azza will be quiet at first. The women will pass dates and bitter coffee in Styrofoam cups. The men will sit in silence that holds more than sorrow. It will hold rage, shame, helplessness. The room will fill with people who’ve never been to Palestine, who can’t speak fluent Arabic, who have never smelled the thyme that grows wild on those hills. And still we will cry as though we had known him our whole lives. Because in a way, we did.

He died the way Palestinians have been dying since the Nakba—choked by land theft, beaten by settlers under the watchful eye of soldiers, denied medical aid until it was too late. They held him as he bled. They struck his head and back and legs until his body collapsed. Then they blocked the ambulance for three hours. By the time it was allowed through, his soul had already departed. He was laid to rest beneath soil he died trying to protect. His funeral was postponed, just long enough for his father to return from America and see his son’s body one last time.

In Islam, a martyr is not dead. “Do not say of those who are killed in the way of Allah that they are dead. Rather, they are alive, but you perceive it not” (2:154).

But what does that mean for the rest of us who remain here, suspended between survival and witnessing, our hearts pierced again and again by the same spear? Every martyr leaves behind a wound that does not heal, a scar that opens each time another name is added to the list. Saif. Wadea Al-Fayoume (6). Hajj Kamel Jawad. Amer Rabee (14). Shireen Abu Akleh. How many more?

“Everything in this world can be robbed and stolen,” wrote Ghassan Kanafani, “except one thing: this one thing is the love that emanates from a human being toward a solid commitment to a conviction or cause.”

And that is why they remain with us. Not because their lives were spared, but because their conviction still breathes through ours.

Shireen was more than a journalist, she was the voice we tuned our grief to. For decades, her presence on screen was a kind of compass, steady and unflinching, narrating our suffering not as spectacle but as truth. She walked into refugee camps and shelled-out streets with the clarity of someone who knew that bearing witness was a sacred duty. And when she was killed, shot in the head while wearing her press vest, it was not just a silencing of a reporter, but of a people. The bullet that ended her life passed through the myth of objectivity, through the promises of international law, and struck the core of our collective memory. No apology could ever return her voice. But her voice is not gone. It lives in the thousands who now carry cameras and courage into the fire.

Amer was fourteen and lived between two worlds—born in New Jersey, raised in Turmus Ayya, a village by Road 60, where his laughter once chased scooters and footballs through olive groves. On April 6, while he and two friends picked green almonds, Israeli soldiers opened fire from a distance, striking Amer eleven times and declaring him a “terrorist,” though his only act was gathering fruit under a heatlit sky.

Kamel Jawad was a fifty-six year old Lebanese-American father of four. Hajj Jawad was killed by an Israeli airstrike while volunteering near a hospital in Nabatieh. He had chosen not to flee. He had chosen to stay and help the elderly, the disabled, the ones with nowhere to go. His daughter said it best: “His response to political conflict was always simple: I stand with the oppressed.”

What ties these deaths together is not just the violence, but the silence that followed. The indignity of being erased even as your blood is still warm. The statements from governments that read like bureaucratic apologies. The State Department confirmed Kamel’s death, called it “alarming,” and said it was “a tragedy.” A tragedy. As if his life were a natural disaster and not the direct result of American bombs and American policy.

We live in a country where citizenship is supposed to mean something. Where protection, dignity, and grief are rationed based on proximity to whiteness.

And Saif, his name barely registered in the press. No statement of outrage. No calls for investigation. No flag at half-mast. If he had been anyone else—white, Jewish, Western, his name would be a headline. But he was Palestinian, and that means his death is a footnote in a genocide without end. It means being blamed for your own killing. It means learning that your life is less than disposable. It is, to the West, invisible.

Our grief is not just for Saif and Amer. It is for the knowledge that our lives, our families, our memories are considered collateral. That the land we come from is a testing ground for weapons and a graveyard for children. That our mothers must bury their sons with nothing but a shroud and a prayer, while the world debates the politics of their pain.

But we also grieve the part of ourselves that begins to die each time we try to live normally in a world like this. Every bite of food that passes through the mouth while others starve. Every laugh shared while bodies lie unburied. Every time we tell our parents we made it home safe when someone else’s son did not. This is what it means to be in diaspora. To be alive and yet constantly haunted by those who are not.

Still, we are not allowed the luxury of despair. Our people have turned grief into a form of resistance. We bury our dead and plant olive trees above them. We sing to them. We say their names over and over until the world can no longer look away. “Shaheed,” we call them. Not victim. Not casualty. Not statistic. Shaheed.

The Trump administration has remained silent, offering neither condolences nor accountability, as if the murder of a Palestinian-American by illegal settlers falls beneath the threshold of outrage. When The New York Times finally published the story, they withheld even his nationality from the headline, as though the label “Palestinian” alone was enough to strip him of the protections and rights supposedly guaranteed by his American citizenship. And while this is not to suggest that being American makes one life more worthy than another, it lays bare a deeper truth: that to be Palestinian in the eyes of the West is to be treated as inherently disposable, as if our blood carries no weight, as if the injustice done to us does not require explanation.

At the azza today, someone will eventually stand to speak. Maybe an uncle. Maybe an imam. He will tell us not to weep for Saif, for he is alive in a way that transcends this world. He will remind us that martyrdom is an honor, that his blood will water the soil of Palestine, that he died defending what was his. But behind every word will sit the aching knowledge that he should still be here. That no child should be made to choose between exile and death.

We will lower our heads. We will press our palms together. We will remember the hadith that promises: “There are one hundred degrees in Paradise which Allah has prepared for those who strive in His cause.” And we will wonder how many of our sons, brothers, fathers, daughters, sisters, mothers it will take before the gates are full.

The streets of Ramallah are still stained. The hills of Sinjil are still watched. The ambulances still arrive too late. In the United States, we carry this grief in our bones like an illness inherited through blood. It makes our shoulders heavy. It makes our nights long. But it also keeps us alive. It tells us we are not numb yet. We are not dead yet.

There is something sacred in this pain. It binds us across oceans and generations. It reminds us that we are part of a people who have refused to disappear. That even when the world turns its back, we face forward. We speak. We write. We mourn loudly. We refuse to forget.

Today, we will sit together, and we will cry. We will grieve the life Saif should have lived—the laughter, the love, the quiet mornings. We will speak of Kamel’s kindness and his unwavering choice to stand where it was most dangerous. We will pass cups of coffee and say alhamdulillah because even in death, our people die standing. And then, someone will ask:

If our dead still live, what does that make of those who killed them? And what of those who watched and said nothing?

A life does not end when breath leaves the body, it ends when the world agrees it was never worth inhaling in the first place. Some are born into a silence already prepared for their disappearance, into a language where their names cannot be conjugated in the future tense. The soil knows them, the olives bend toward them, but the world averts its gaze. There is no tragedy in their death, only fulfillment of a quiet, cruel promise: that their absence will not disturb the architecture of power.

Palestinian life has never been allowed the dignity of permanence. But our blood is not cheap. It is not a price to be negotiated at the altar of foreign policy. A child in Gaza is not the cost of a state's security. A man defending his land in the hills of Ramallah is not a disruption. These are full lives—lives with memories, laughter, debts, songs, hopes buried in drawers, and soil still warm from olive trees.

When one of us is martyred, it is not just a life stolen but a whole lineage interrupted. It is a name that will never be called again at the dinner table, a voice that won’t answer when their mother wakes in the night. It is a room that will stay untouched for years, a football jersey folded and hidden, a face etched into the prayer rugs of the people who loved him. But it is also a reckoning. Not because we seek revenge, but because memory refuses to be buried. His absence becomes a kind of presence, an ache that refuses to soften, a reminder that we do not grieve alone. And somehow, despite it all, we go on carrying them. Not as martyrs on posters, but as people—still speaking, still waiting to come home.