The boy you see in the photo was called Ahmad Hacham Hamdi Abu Marakhia, he was a 25-year-old Palestinian who fled to Israel and lived in a shelter. Israel not only granted him a temporary residence permit, but was planning a move to Canada for his safety. Ahmed Hamdi had fled the Arab side of Hebron, the one under Palestinian control, about 2 years ago after his sexual orientation was discovered. Although Rita Petrenko, CEO of the safe house Al-Bait Al-Mokhtalef, a shelter for Israeli Arabs and LGBT Palestinians, had helped the boy obtain a permit from the Israeli civil administration to live in Israel and in the meantime was helping him obtain the permits to emigrate to Canada, the long hand of hatred towards homosexuals and others in general has managed to strike.
News of Ahmad Hacham Hamdi's death spread Wednesday evening by means of online videos showing his body being transported to the Palestinian section of the city of Hebron. In the horrifying videos that have circulated on social media and are gaining multiple shares mainly in the Palestinian Authority territories and Jordan, his dismembered body was lying on the side of a road so that passersby could see him and had warned of it. A macabre warning from a medieval world that we thought we had overcome forever.
As reported by the Israeli television channel N12, a few hours before the murder Ahmed had left the shelter to go to work in one of the premises in Tel Aviv which, in a discreet way, helps, making them work and earn, the guests of the shelter house. Ahmed, however, never arrived at work and the first reports of his death had already arrived in the evening. The other guests of the facility, interviewed anonymously, expressed the certainty that the boy was kidnapped and taken to the territories administered by the Palestinian Authority before being brutally tortured and killed by beheading. Although the Palestinian police are investigating the incident, there is no doubt, also in the way it was committed, that the motive for the murder is closely linked to his sexual orientation.
Ahmed was gay, like ninety other Palestinian gays and lesbians who have currently found refuge in Israel, because they have suffered discrimination, violence and risk their lives in the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority. This is because in the Arab world homosexuality is a crime to be punished with death. But it is not the only point to reflect on.
With the exception of a few short articles lost in the inside pages, this news has not found much echo in any newspaper of the old continent, will it be because it happened in the Palestinian territories that should never be put in a bad light? Perhaps, but if the same event or a similar one had happened in another corner of the world perhaps, but we are sure, the death of Ahmad Hacham Hamdi Abu Marakhia would have had a greater resonance and the consciences of rights defenders would have been much more hit. Since Ahmad Hacham Hamdi Abu Marakhia was kidnapped and beheaded due to his homosexuality in Arab Hebron under the Palestinian Authority, a blurb for the record may suffice.
What leaves sad is the deafening silence that comes from the rainbow world LGBT, a world that for some time has entered into confusion, or rather, precisely in short circuit.
A world that is politically aligned against Israel even if the Jewish State is, as already mentioned, the lifeline for Arab lesbians and gays, Palestinians and non-Palestinians. The only state in the Middle East where two Gay Prides a year are held, and with great participation, including international ones, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. World that, for pure ideology, has been on the wrong side of the fence of its own interests for too long.
References:
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2022/10/07/gay-palestine-murder-ahmed-hacham-hamdi-abu-marakhia-israel/
https://worldisraelnews.com/gay-palestinian-kidnapped-beheaded-tried-fleeing-to-israel/
