He was the son his mother was proud of: he memorized the entire Qur’an as a boy, and he topped his university class. He wanted to be a doctor. But above all, Shaban al-Taloo dreamed of escape.
Since Israel launched its devastating response to the Hamas-led offensive a year ago, Mr. Al-Daloo wrote passionately. request Posted on social media videos He also started a GoFundMe from his family’s small plastic tent page Calling the world for help to get out of the Gaza Strip.
Instead, the world watched him burn to death.
Mr. Al-Daloo, 19, was identified by his family as the young man engulfed in flames and waving his arms helplessly in a video that has become a symbol of the horrors of war for Gazans trapped inside their besieged enclaves. Society is watching.
On October 14, Israel said it carried out a “precision strike” on a Hamas command center operating near Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the coastal city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. Dozens of families, like Dulles, who were forced to leave their homes, set up tents in a parking lot inside the hospital complex. They believed that international laws prohibiting most attacks on medical facilities would ensure their safety.
Israeli army He said The fires that followed may have been caused by “secondary explosions,” without specifying what that meant. “The incident is under consideration,” he added.
As the fire destroyed the tent of Talu family, Mr. Al-Taloo’s father, Ahmed, ran back inside. He got his young son and then his two older daughters out to safety. By the time he returned, it was time for his eldest son.
“I could see him, sitting there, and he was praying with his finger raised,” she said, referring to the Muslim shahada, a creed of faith recited at birth and death. “I called him: ‘Shaban, forgive me, son! Forgive me! I can’t do anything.”
Mr. Al-Taloo died the day before his 20th birthday. The moment of his death was not only remembered by his father – it spread around the world.
Scenes of people burning alive in the camp, including Mr. Al-Dalou’s mother even prompted Israel’s staunch ally, the United States, to question the attack.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said on Wednesday that “I watched in horror as images from central Gaza were poured onto my screen.”
“There are no words, no words to describe what we saw,” he said in a Report to the United Nations. “Even if Hamas is operating near a hospital, Israel has a responsibility to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties.”
Video of burning body, Mr. The family, identified as al-Daloo, was located by The New York Times at the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital where the camp is located.
Mr. Al-Daloo, sick from shock and malnutrition amid the ever-worsening siege, often told his aunt Garbahan al-Daloo about his ideas for escaping Gaza.
“His plan was to get himself out and then find a way to get his sisters and his brothers and his parents out,” he told The Times, sitting in his daughter Tasnim’s hospital room. She recovered from abdominal injuries from the same strike.
Mr. Al-Dalou also turned to the Internet, contacting activists abroad and helping the Gazans set up online fundraising pages.
“You must open your heart for us. I was nineteen and I buried my dreams,” he said wrote In an Instagram post. “Support me to find them again!”
The Propaganda Raised over $20,000. But even if he and some of his relatives paid enough to arrange an escape from Gaza, the effort was futile: Since May, Israel has closed the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, making it impossible to leave.
In a text exchange from May that his aunt showed The Times, Mr. Al-Dalu asked him whether his frequent ailments would qualify him for medical discharge. She replied that it wasn’t possible and that even a friend “whose sister loses an eye, they struggle to find a way to get her out.”
But her son-in-law, who often joined her in the tent for lunch, said it seemed inevitable. He would watch the news, analyze the speeches of Israel’s prime minister, and tell him: “Have faith, everything will be fine. If God wills, God will help us, aunt,” she recalled.
It was a different story among his friends, said his cousin and schoolmate Mohaidin Al-Dalou. During the war, the two often spent frustrated evenings on the beach.
Mr. Al-Taloo harbored dreams of going abroad to pursue a Ph.D. in software engineering, he studied in his last two years at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. He had already given up his ambition to become a doctor, his relative said, as his family could not afford the cost of the course.
As the war dragged on, he said, Mr.
“Also, he would tell me that he wanted to be a martyr, that he wanted to be a martyr with his friends, his grandparents in heaven,” he said.
10 days before the attack that killed him, Mr. Mosque Near the hospital, he was reciting the Quran and spent the night. Israel also said at the time that the attack targeted a Hamas command center.
The blast, which local officials said killed 26 people, left Mr al-Dalou with a piece of shrapnel in his neck, behind his ear. “His stitches haven’t been removed yet,” cried his aunt.
On a social media Position After the mosque strike, Mr. Al-Dalou described waking up in the hospital, shouting to the doctors that he had reached heaven with a friend, Anas al-Zarad.
Mr. Al-Taloo, particularly distressed in recent posts over the friend’s recent death, posted pictures of them together as boys and young men, laughing and joking.
“I have never felt anything more terrible than the thought that the dead do not exist,” he wrote in one post. “The human mind, with all its brain cells and capacity to absorb and create, is helpless in its absence.”
Mr. Those who now face the same breakdown in al-Dalu’s absence remember a young man far wiser than his years, whose ambition and energy seemed boundless, and who made everyone his friend.
Ms Al-Taloo recalled how her aunt, her mother Alaa, treated Mr Al-Taloo “more like her brother than her son” with many teasing and intimate conversations.
Mr. Al-Dalu’s mother once sold her gold bracelets to finance his high school education. When the war started last year, his aunt said, Mr. Al-Dalou used the money he earned working online in software engineering to pay himself back.
After the destruction of the two brothers’ small garment factory, as a means of earning money, Mr. Al-Dalou also used his money to help his father and uncle, Garbahan’s husband, set up a falafel stand in their tent outside the hospital. War.
Mr. Al-Daloo’s father said he saw their relationship as something beyond father and son.
“He kept my secrets and I kept his,” she said, her face and hands heavily scarred with burns. “We were friends, and I was proud of that.”
As he watched the fire that claimed the lives of his wife and son, he saw Mr. Al-Talo went on to say: “I told Shaaban that I have never felt so broken as I feel now. I have never been so defeated as I am now.
His last memory of them is from the day before the fire. The three had gone to the beach munching on sunflower seeds and chatting. “Now, well,” he said, “God rest his soul.”
On Friday, senior Mr. Al-Dalo was dealt another blow: his youngest son, 10, died from the severity of his burns, despite his father’s efforts to save him. He was buried with his mother and his brother.
Arijeta Lajka Contributed report.
