Moheba Khorsheed

Moheba Khorsheed was a Palestinian activist and leader of the Zahrat al-Uqhawan (The Chrysanthemum Flower in English), an all-female armed group to fight against Zionist paramilitaries in the 1948 Palestine war.^[1]

Khorsheed was born in the Palestinian city of Yaffa in 1925. She studied at the Higher Teachers' Institute in Jerusalem, where she earned a diploma in education.^[2] She returned to her hometown of Yaffa, where she taught math at an all-girl secondary school. She later joined the Arab Women's Association of Palestine.^[3][4]

On February 27, 1947, Khorsheed and her sister Nariman Nihad Khorshid^[5] founded the Chrysanthemum Flower as an all-female political group.^[6] Before the war the Chrysanthemum Flower, was actively engaged in providing medical treatment and establishing a welfare network to help students and poor people and promoting interfaith rapprochement.^[7] after the outbreak of the 1948 war, the group's role was to raise funds to buy weapons and to provide aid to displaced Palestinian families, but After Khorsheed witnessed a Palestinian boy being killed by a Zionist paramilitary sniper,^[8] the group turned into an all-female armed resistance network.^[9][10] Their main activities were ambushing Zionist militants. In one Al-Jazeera interview Khorsheed told a story about how she raided a Zionist paramilitary camp in the middle of the night and killed their leader and captured the others.^[11]

After the fall of Yaffa to Zionist paramilitaries, she was displaced by boat to Egypt.^[12] Then, she moved to Lebanon and later to Jordan, where she became a teacher again and got married. She died in 2000 in Jordan.^[3][13]