Hadeel Sbakhi and Abdelrahman Abu Taqyia, Palestinian couple documenting their lives on Instagram

Hadeel Sbakhi and Abdelrahman Abu Taqyia met as university students. They married and started a business today, but their equipment was destroyed in an Israeli attack. Now they are trying to show with their Instagram posts that Gaza is not all tragedy. They struggle to eat and survive, but they also have happiness in their lives. Their Instagram handle has 112,000 followers. They also post on YouTube.

More information: PBS NewsHour

Reem Zeidan, wife and mother

Reem Zeiden was shot through the forehead in front of her 20-year-old daughter and her 12-year-old son as she walked toward an aid distribution site before dawn on July 1, hoping to get food to feed her family. She had been rehearsing with her children where they should meet in case shooting caused panic and chaos among the crowds of hungry Gazans approaching the distribution site. Her last words, according to her son: “‘If we get separated, where will we meet again?’”

“We went there out of desperation. Hunger is what forced my mother to go. She had been going every day for a full week, walking six hours to get there and coming back with nothing,” said her daughter, Mirvat. 

Two days before Reem was killed, Israeli troops opened fire on the crowds approaching the aid distribution site. “I told my mother it was a sign from God not to go again and that convinced her,” Mirvat said. “But she would quickly change her mind when my little sister Razan, who is only five years old, cried to her that she was hungry.”

More information: The Guardian

Pediatrician Ahmmed Al-Farra and a 6-month old baby he is trying to save

Dr. Al-Farra is head of pediatrics and maternity in Gaza's Nasser Medical Complex. He says there are no functioning hospitals in the northern part of the Gaza strip, and his hospital has repeatedly been bombed. 

“We're seeing children with marasmus -- skin and bone," he said. "Some are just 40% of their expected weight. Severe malnutrition, no protein, no vitamins."

Marasmus is a form of severe malnutrition.

Siwar Ashour, a child in Gaza, was born small, but was a relatively healthy baby six months ago, according to Al-Farra.

But today, she is acutely malnourished and fighting for her life in the Nasser Hospital. She is bound in plastic because she has lost so much weight that he can no longer regulate her body temperature. Six months old, she weighs just over 7 pounds. That is less than half the weight of an average American baby girl, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

"If she does not take the suitable formula of milk, unfortunately, she will not survive," Al-Farra said.

More information: ABC News

Yaqeen Sbeita, five months old, and her parents

Yaqeen Sbeita, born five months ago in the midst of the Gaza war, was killed with her parents, Ali Aoun and Saja Ammar Sbeita, when Israel attacked her apartment near the Carrefour Mall in Gaza City.

According to Yaqeen’s grandmother, Saja was nursing her baby girl when the family was killed.

The Israeli military did not respond to an NBC request for comment on why the apartment was targeted. NBC News reported the attack on July 9.

More information: NBC News

Hanya Aljamal, former English teacher

Hanya Aljamal used to teach English in the Gaza strip, but her school was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. Before the war, she was applying to American universities to study for a Master’s degree in international development. Her Gaza is a different world now, so much so that the Gaza she remembers feels like a fake memory. 

Aljamal works for a British for a British aid organization that runs a project for children in Gaza. She kept an audio diary for the BBC to give listeners a sense of what her life is like today. It starts on Tuesday, June 1.

In one entry, she says children came to the organization’s kitchen with empty pots, begging for food, but she and another staff member turned them away because their food was for people in the aid organization’s camps and they couldn’t feed everyone. 

In another, girls take part in a therapy session at which they talk about emotions – what makes them happy (“When you get really high marks on a test and you feel proud of yourself!”) and what makes them sad. One girl suddenly started crying. She had lost both parents.

One day that week, she watched five colorful kites flying in the air. "I like kites - they're like an active act of hope," she says. "Every kite is a couple of kids down there trying to have a normal childhood in the midst of all this."

More information: BBC

Mahmoud Ajjour, 9-year-old boy

Mahmoud Ajjour and his family were fleeing Israeli shelling in Gaza City in March, 2024, when he was hit. He was evacuated to Qatar but lost both of his arms. New York Times photographer Samar Abu Elouf’s photo of him won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year.

More information: World Press Photo of the Year