#FreeThemAll

There is something haunting about this photograph now. Taken before May 2021, it shows the military council of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades gathered together in one narrow underground room. Mohammed Al-Deif sits at the far end, above the others. Around him are Marwan Issa, Ahmad Ghandour, Ghazi Abu Tamaa, Mohammed Odeh, Izz al-Din Haddad, Ayman Nofal, Raad Saad, Mohammed Shabana, Hakam Issa, Bassam Issa, Raad Thabet, Mohamed Sinwar and Rafa Salama. Today, not one of them remains. Every man in this photograph has since been martyred. They did not fall together. Most were targeted separately, one after another, across different years and different Israeli strikes. Bassam Issa was martyred during the war of May 2021. Ayman Nofal and Ahmad Ghandour were martyred in 2023. Marwan Issa, Rafa Salama and Mohammed Al-Deif followed in 2024, with Deif martyred in an Israeli airstrike near Khan Younis on 13 July. Others were martyred through 2025 and beyond, until the photograph that once showed a living military council became, in its entirety, a photograph of the dead. There is something deeply solemn in that transformation. When the shutter closed, none of them could have known exactly how the years ahead would unfold, or that one day people would look back at this room knowing that every face within it had passed from this world. For Palestinians and many of us who remember them as martyrs, the image carries something beyond military history. It speaks of men living beneath constant pursuit, of friendships and responsibilities shared in hidden rooms, and of the strange intimacy of a photograph whose meaning changes completely with time. One by one, the chairs emptied. One by one, the voices disappeared. Yet faith teaches that death is not simply disappearance. A man leaves behind his deeds, the people who loved him, the memories carried by those who knew him and the account that belongs ultimately to God alone. Perhaps that is what makes this photograph so powerful now. It captured a single ordinary moment between men who could not see the whole road ahead of them. Years later, every place in the room has become a place of remembrance. May God have mercy upon the martyred, accept those whose intentions were sincere, comfort the families who carried their absence, and grant peace to a land that has buried far too many of its sons.