The veteran Palestinian fighter, blown to pieces in 2006, lives on with thousands of his comrades on the martyrdom posters that line Gaza's dusty streets, an army of ghosts haunting the impoverished, war-battered territory.

"His body was destroyed but his soul, his spirit, lives on," his black-veiled widow Tawhida says. "The portraits are so that the people will remember him -- not us, because we can never forget -- but others."

The small, thin mother of four sits in a sparsely furnished room in one of Gaza City's poorer neighbourhoods. The grey walls along the dirt roads outside are adorned with colourful Arabic calligraphy celebrating the armed struggle.

Qayed smiles down from a flame-coloured poster that also honours his armed faction, the Mujahideen Brigades. Israeli tanks crash through the lower corners on either side of a group of masked fighters launching mortar rounds.

"God writes our fate. Thanks be to God," his mother Karima says with a tense smile as she sits next to Tawhida, cutting vegetables at the coffee table.

The portraits were gifts from family and friends, presented to the grieving family at Qayed's wake. "I lost a part of myself when he died, but the pictures remind me of him and it helps to fill the gap," Tawhida says.

Earlier this month Israel and the Hamas movement agreed to an Egyptian-brokered truce aimed at ending months of fighting that has claimed hundreds of lives and lifting a crippling Israeli blockade of the Islamist-ruled territory.

The truce went into effect on June 19 but the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is far from over. Gaza's martyrdom posters remain a ubiquitous memorial to its young men lost to war and an inspiration to those who would follow them.

"It's a way of praising and glorifying these martyrs so that people know the cost of the occupation," Hani al-Yazji, the owner of a Gaza City printing shop says. "It's a way of preserving their memory."

When a fighter is killed. his friends come to Yazji's shop with pictures. They chose the background, the colours, and the slogans and flags of the armed group to which he belonged.

-- 'These are advertisements for the armed factions' --

The gold-domed Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is the most popular backdrop, Yazji says. "Most people want the guy holding a gun and Al-Aqsa in the background, because they want to feel they are fighting for Jerusalem."

Yazji himself is not allied to any armed group and steers clear of politics. "I do them all. If someone brings a picture of (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert I will make a poster of him. This is my livelihood."

The posters cost around 20 dollars (13 euros) per square metre (yard).

Since Israel sealed off Gaza from all but vital humanitarian goods in the wake of the bloody Hamas takeover in June 2007 the little corner shop has become a grim measure of the territory's growing misery.

"Nothing is coming in so there is no business making Coca-Cola signs or McDonald's signs," Yazji says as he sits in his dark, stuffy office, unable to work on his computer because of a routine power outage.

Up until the truce the portraits of fallen fighters helped sustain his shop, at times accounting for as much as 20 percent of his income, but Yazji would prefer to do advertisements and storefront signs.

"It would help my business if the truce holds but that depends on Israel adhering to its obligations and opening the crossings," he says.

Some printing shop owners decline to make the posters. "I don't accept this kind of work because I don't want to deal with armed groups or armed men," said another Gaza City shop owner who asked not to be named.

"These are advertisements for the armed factions. It's like a competition between them," he says.

For the widow Tawhida the posters are a daily reminder of her husband's heroism, an opportunity to tell his story to anyone who asks about the smiling man with a shaved head and moustache looking down from the wall.

Her dry brown eyes stare out from the slit in her black veil as she calmly tells the story of his death.

"He always knew he would be martyred because he carried out a lot of operations," she says, referring to the near-daily rocket attacks on southern Israel that have ceased since the truce took effect.

"He had just finished carrying out an operation. He went to his social club, he performed his ablutions and he prayed to God," she says.

The first air strike came shortly thereafter and left him seriously wounded, she says. Some other men loaded him into a car and raced to the hospital, but another two missiles slammed into the vehicle before it arrived.

"He was blown to pieces. They could not even recognise him, praise be to God," she said. "When I heard the news I did not scream or cry. I felt about him the way one feels about a groom at his wedding."

His death left her alone with four children, all under the age of eight, who may only know their father as the fighter in the picture.

"We know that when a martyr dies his soul, his spirit, lives on," Tawhida says. "All the martyrs have sons, and they will continue the resistance."

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