Reem Badwan, 3, “soul of my soul,” said her grandfather. The following year, he was killed, too.

In a video seen around the world in November, 2023, Khaled Nabhan held up the lifeless body of his 3-year-old granddaughter, Reem, kissed her eyes and called her the “soul of my soul.”

She was killed in a strike alongside her brother, Tariq, 5, two of the 18,500 child victims whose names were published by the Washington Post.

According to Wikipedia, her grandfather was killed in December, 2024, by an Israeli tank.

More information at Washington Post

Aseel, Ibrahim, and their babies

Ibrahim, 27, is a photographer who works mainly for humanitarian organizations. He and his wife, Aseel, 25, have a 14-month-old daughter, Rose.

They were among the four families who kept video diaries for the first year of the war, for use in a BBC documentary, “One year of war in Gaza: Life, Death, and Hope.”

When we meet Aseel, she is overdue to deliver a second baby. The birth goes well and they name their new baby girl Hayat, which means life. “At a time when everything makes you feel hopeless, she is the one who can bring hope and meaning to our lives,” says Aseel.

But it’s a challenge to survive. There is so little food in the market that Aseel can’t breastfeed. She, Rose, and Hayat all get seriously ill and Hayat needs hospital care. When they arrive, they find the hospital is packed with patients and the staff is stretched to the breaking point. But all three recover.

Ibrahim has to leave his family in their tent while he returns to work as a photographer so he can earn money to support them. “Whenever I take pictures of the children killed in this war,” says Ibrahim, “I feel that they could be my family. I keep waiting to see if it’s them or not.”

More at BBC

Mariam Dagga, 33, photo journalist, killed at a Gaza hospital along with 20 other people including four other journalists

Israeli troops fired on Nasser Hospital in Gaza August 15 and then fired again on journalists and rescue workers rushing to the scene. Among the dead were five journalists, including 33-year-old Mariam Dagga, a visual journalist who worked for The Associated Press.

The AP posted a selection of Mariam Dagga’s photos here, along with links to some of the stories that included her work. 

The Reuters news agency said one of its reporters was killed in the initial strike as he operated a live television shot on an upper floor of the hospital. 

According to the British newspaper The Guardian, it has become the norm for journalists working in Gaza to prepare their wills in case they are killed. In hers, Dagga left behind two sets of instructions: to her colleagues, do not cry at her funeral; to her 13-year-old son, Ghaith, make her proud.

More at The Associated Press and The Guardian

Adam, a youth worker, and his sisters, Saja and Shaiman

Adam, 29, is a youth worker in Gaza. His two sisters are Saja, 25, and Shaiman, 26. They were among the four families who kept video diaries for the first year of the war, for a BBC documentary, “One year of war in Gaza: Life, Death, and Hope.”

The two sisters are sheltering at a United Nations school with many other displaced Gazans. “We’re trying to imagine ourselves playing with our cats in our garden at home, or on the beach in Gaza, sipping coffee,” says Saja. “We hope peace comes to Gaza soon.”

The school has already been bombed once, with Adam inside. There were many dead. It is attacked again and the family decides to leave. But nowhere is safe.

Adam’s brother, who lives in Ireland, manages to raise enough money through an online appeal — $21,000 — to pay an Egyptian travel company to get Adam and his two sisters through the Rafah Crossing with Egypt. They get out before Israel occupies the Palestinian side and Egypt shuts it down. At the end of the film, they are in Cairo.

More at BBC

Rajab Hind, 6, appealed for help after relatives were killed around her

Hind spent her final hours trapped in a bullet-ridden car, surrounded by the bodies of six dead relatives, making desperate calls for help. For three hours, a Red Crescent operator stayed on the line, reciting the Quran and comforting her as an Israeli tank approached. “Come get me, quickly,” she pleaded.

The Red Crescent sent two paramedics in an ambulance to rescue her, after clearing the trip with the Israeli military, but the Red Crescent lost contact with the ambulance staff. Twelve days later, Hind and her family were found dead. So were the two paramedics sent to help them.

More information at Washington Post

Muhammad Asfour and his family: Israel warned them to evacuate Gaza City, but they can’t

Subhi Muhammad Asfour came to northern Gaza in search of food, a home and hope. Instead, he and his family are hungry and terrified, as Israeli evacuation orders threaten to force them to move for a seventh time since the war began.

“I came to western Gaza looking for a place to put up a tent,” Asfour, 46, told NBC News. He said transporting his family from the area, as the Israeli military has told Palestinian civilians to do, would cost $500 or more. “I don’t have money,” he said.

“I’m afraid for my children, but where can I go?” he said. “There’s no place and no safety.”

“I want the war to end. I want to sleep. I want to take a shower. I want to eat. We want to raise children,” he said. “God willing, the war will end before we get tired, flee and die.”

 More at NBC News

Mohamed Kullab, 29, killed in an airstrike

Mohamed Kullab, 29, was in his tent in a camp for displaced persons when an Israeli airstrike killed him on Tuesday, July 22, between 5pm and 6pm.

His brother-in-law, Amar Ragaida said he had talked with Mohamed just a day earlier when they bumped into each other looking for aid. "He told me, 'don't go on your own, I will try and get you some flour',” said Amar. “The next day, he was dead.”

Amar found out several hours later when people called Mohamed’s sister to tell her.

Mohamed leaves behind a sister and a younger brother.

More information: BBC

Aya, law graduate and women’s rights advocate

Aya is a 23-year-old recent law school graduate and campaigner for women’s rights who has applied to study international law at the University of Sienna in Italy.

Her family is one of four that kept video diaries during the first year of the Gaza war for use in a BBC documentary, “One year of war in Gaza: Life, Death, and Hope.”

During the course of the year, Aya travels an emotional roller coaster. Early on, she’s checking herself out in a mirror to see that she’s still pretty. She’s terrified when the family is forced to relocate amid bombing, and bored in the tent they move to.

She’s devastated when she learns that the family home in northern Gaza has been destroyed, elated to be accepted by the University of Sienna, grief-stricken when she learns an uncle has been killed, and crushed when the Rafah crossing is closed just before she was to use it to go to Italy. “I might die without achieving my dreams,” she says.

More at BBC

Abdullah Abu Zerka, 4, died of starvation despite evacuation to Turkey

Abdullah Abu Zerka died in the Adana City Training and Research Hospital in Turkey despite 10 days of relentless effort by doctors to help him recover from severe malnutrition.

The staff are still working to save his six-month-old sister, Habiba, and they are cautiously optimistic that she will make it.

The evacuation to Turkiye came through a Turkish Foreign Ministry humanitarian programme, with Turkish officials working diplomatic channels to secure the family’s passage. But the process took weeks – time that Abdullah’s failing body couldn’t afford. “We arrived carrying children who were already ghosts of themselves,” said Hamed Abu Zerka, the children’s father.

Abdullah’s body was cremated in the Gulbahcesi neighbourhood cemetery in Adana

More at Al Jazeera

Basma Al-Aïdi, prosthetics maker

Basma Al-Aïdi, 30, is one of the last nine prosthetics specialists still working in the Gaza Strip, where nearly 4,000 amputations have taken place since the start of the war.

She and the other eight can’t keep up. "I don't even have time to take a five-minute break,” she says. “The number of cases far exceeds our capacity."

The French newspaper Le Monde interviewed her via WhatsApp because Israel does not allow foreign journalists into Gaza.

More at LeMonde

Ismail Abu Hatab, filmmaker and photojournalist

Ismail Abu Hatab, 34, was the founder of the Clight TV production company. Hatab worked with a range of media outlets and organized photo exhibitions highlighting life in Gaza.

On November 2, 2023, he was seriously injured in an Israeli airstrike that targeted his office on the 16th floor of Al-Ghifari Tower in Gaza City.

On June 30, he was killed in the Israeli airstrike on the beachfront Al-Baqa Cafe.

More at Channel 4 (British TV) and Committee to Protect Journalists

Sajed al-Ghalban, 10, orphan

On one page in his notebook, Sajed al-Ghalban, 10, has drawn a picture of his mother and father at their old home in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. On another page, there’s a drawing of his mother taking him to a vegetable stand.

Sajed’s parents were killed in an air strike in the third week of the war in 2023.

For nearly two years, Sajed and his younger brother, Abdallah, were cared for by an aunt. Then, in July, that aunt was killed in a strike on a nearby tent. Now, they live in another tent with another aunt and her three children.

With no parents and a younger brother to care for, Sajed is suspended between childhood and premature adulthood. Sometimes he plays marbles and hide-and-seek with other children in the camp. But he is also increasingly trying to support his aunt in keeping their makeshift household together.

He sweeps the tent each morning. He lines up for hours in the heat to fetch water. He fixes the tent poles when they collapse. He makes kites from scrap material and sells them for pocket change that he saves to buy food for himself and Abdallah.

“I’m the man now,” Sajed told his aunt. “I’ll go buy what we need.”

More at New York Times

Abdullah Alhore, bodybuilding champion

An Israeli drone attack in Gaza’s Ashik Rudwan district on Saturday, August 2, killed three people and more according to Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud. The dead included Abdullah Alhore, a fitness bodybuilder celebrity.

Mahmoud also reported a Red Crescent medical staff worker was killed in an Israeli attack on a Red Crescent facility associated with Nasser Hospital.

More at Al Jazeera

Tala Abu Hilal, 8, former star student

Before the war, Tala Abu Hilal, 8, was the star of her class and sometimes got up in the middle of the night to cram for tests, according to her mother. 

“I wanted to be a doctor,” Tala said in a recent interview. “I wanted my daddy to build a hospital for me. I wanted to treat everyone for free. My daddy is in heaven now.”

There’s no school now, and Tala whiles away the day inventing games, some of which are disturbingly warped by the violence that surrounds her. Once, her mother recalled, Tala picked up a stone and said to her sisters: “I’ll throw this stone. Pretend it’s an F-16 missile.”

Then she hurled it at a tent.

More at New York Times

Malak Musleh, young woman boxer

Malak Musleh, 20, was a young boxer who was training to represent Palestine in international women’s boxing competitions.

On June 30, she went to the beachside Al-Baqa Cafe in Gaza to meet a good friend. They had had a falling out, and the friend arrived with a giant teddy bear as a peace offering. When an Israeli missile struck, the teddy bear survived. Malak and her friend were killed.

More at Channel 4 (British TV) and CGTN (Chinese government broadcaster)

Rahma Abu Abed, a little girl trying to remember good food

Rahma Abu Abed, 12, plays a game with her friends. They ask one another: What did you eat before the war? What did your home look like before the war? What would you wear if you had new clothes?

She usually eats one meal a day, often lentils or pasta.

Trying to remember what good food looked like, Rahma plays with the wet sand, shaping it into imaginary meals.

More at New York Times

Motasem al-Batta, his wife, and their baby daughter

An Israeli airstrike killed Motasem al-Batta, his wife, and their baby daughter on Saturday, August 16. They died in their tent in the crowded Muwasi area of Gaza.

“Two and a half months, what has she done?” neighbor Fathi Shubeir asked. “They are civilians in an area designated safe.”

More at PBS

Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaiseb, Doctors Without Borders official: “what is happening now in Gaza is beyond anything we have seen”

Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaiseb, Deputy Medical Coordinator for Doctors Without Borders' in Palestine, sent a video report to LeMonde which the Paris newspaper posted on its English language website on August 12.

Dr. Mughaiseb is stationed in Al-Mawassi in southern Gaza.

He told LeMonde that the few hospitals that still function are so overwhelmed, some patients bleed to death while waiting for surgery. “Even after all wars we’ve lived through, what’s happening now in Gaza is beyond anything we’ve seen,” he said.

Doctors Without Borders has sent medical staff to conflicts around the world since it’s founding in 1971, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.

More at LeMonde

Marah Abu Zuhri, 20, died in an Italian hospital after evacuation from Gaza

A young woman from Gaza who was evacuated to Italy for treatment while severely emaciated died in the University Hospital of Pisa on Friday, August 15, less than two days after arriving on a medical evacuation flight.

The hospital said the immediate cause of death was a heart attack. They said Zuhri had suffered severe loss of weight and muscle. 

Meanwhile, as of Saturday, August 16, the Gaza health ministry reported another 11 people had died for lack of food bringing the total to 250.

More at BBC

Janah, 7, in need of medical evacuation

Olga Cherevko,, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza, says she first met Janah in 2024 at an International Medical Corps field hospital where she was treated malnutrition. Janah recovered and returned to her family.

But recently, Cherevko saw her again at Patient Friendly Hospital, her condition worse than before. “I remembered her long eyelashes,” Cherevko said.

Janah is now on a list of children who need medical evacuation because her condition can’t be properly diagnosed and treated in Gaza.

On Wednesday, August 13, the World Health Organization helped transfer 32 children and six adults to Italy, Belgium and Turkey, but more than 14,800 patients are still waiting.

Cherevko says some of the most seriously ill patients, including Janah, have medical issues in addition to malnutrition, but those problems were manageable before the famine.

More at United Nations