Palestinian women secured their place on the frontline of conflict with Israel when a grandmother and a teenager blew themselves up in Gaza and mothers braved gunfire to free men trapped in a mosque.
The walls in the late Fatima al-Najar's home are covered with pictures of her, sporting a trademark green Hamas bandanna over her veil, carrying a gun and inscribed with the epitaph: "Fatima al-Najar, mother of the women fedayeen".
A mother of nine and grandmother of 45, the 70-year-old was active in charitable associations run by the ruling Islamist movement before she killed herself, wounding three Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza on November 23.
"This operation was not what the West calls a suicide attack. It was a martyrdom operation, a political act done out of love for her homeland," says her 52-year-old daughter Fathia, a fellow Hamas activist.
Photographs and poems that honour her mother paper the greying walls of the formal sitting room where Fathia receives visitors. Outside, the mourning tent is still ready to receive "congratulations" from well-wishers.
"My mother was deeply moved by the destruction and Beit Hanun massacre," says Fathia, talking about the botched Israeli shelling of private homes that killed 19 Palestinians, mostly women and children, on November 8.
"My mother's operation is a message to the world, (US President) George (W.) Bush and (Israeli Prime Minister) Ehud Olmert telling them 'change your policy towards the Palestinians'," says Mohammed, one of her sons.
For five months from late June to late November, the Israeli army conducted a series of deadly incursions in the Gaza Strip in a bid to stop rocket attacks against the Jewish state and to free a soldier captured by armed groups.
"Are our children worth less than Israeli children? If the (Israeli) soldier's mother wants to see her son again, our prisoners should be released from their prisons," says Fathia, willing herself to become a suicide bomber.
"Violence breeds violence," she adds, sitting in the Jabaliya family home.
Amin Massud was personally against his daughter Mirvat's suicide bombing. She was an 18-year-old student from the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, Hamas's rival and the faction behind most of the last anti-Israeli suicide attacks. But Mirvat joined Islamic Jihad after a Palestinian family was decimated by an Israeli shell exploding on a Gaza beach on June 9, her father says.
Pictures of a tormented Huda Ghaliya, the only child from the family to escape with her life, sobbing over her father's body, shocked the world. So Mirvat blew herself up in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanun on November 6 in the midst of a massive Israeli army operation in the town in which more than 60 Palestinians were killed.
"If she told me what she was going to do, I would have done everything to stop her. But she kept quiet and left for the university as normal. We heard about her death on television," says Massud, sitting on a foam mattress on the floor of the family home. "I wanted her to finish her studies, to live."
"Every woman should take part in the resistance. But political resistance. Military operations are for men," said Massud, who belongs to the secular and moderate Fatah party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
On the other hand, Hamas woman MP Jamileh al-Shanti believes that "Jihad, protecting hearth and children are the duties of every Palestinian woman". Shanti took part with Najar, Najar's daughter and scores of other mothers, teenagers and children, in a "human shield" operation in Beit Hanun around gunmen holed up in a mosque and trapped by Israeli troops last month.
Braving Israeli gunfire and tanks, around 200 women marched on and entered the mosque to collect the gunmen, before walking out, shielding them in the midst of their heavily veiled ranks, protecting them from Israeli weaponry. "That was a peaceful Jihad operation and a huge victory for Palestinian women because we managed to free the fighters," said Shanti.
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