Shaaban al-Dalou was burned alive after an Israeli strike at a hospital in Gaza. Photo / Instagram
A video of Shaaban al-Dalou burning to death after an Israeli strike at a hospital has stoked criticism from Israel’s allies and highlighted the plight of people trapped in Gaza.
He was the son his mother boasted about: he memorised the entire Quran as a boy, and rose to the top of his university class. He wanted to become a doctor. But most of all, Shaaban al-Dalou dreamed of escape.
Since Israel launched its devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack just over a year ago, al-Dalou wrote impassioned pleas on social media, posted videos from his family’s small plastic tent and even launched a GoFundMe page calling out to the world for help getting out of the Gaza Strip.
Instead, the world watched him burn to death.
Al-Dalou, 19, was identified by his family as the young man helplessly waving his arms, engulfed in flames, in a video that has become a symbol of the horrors of war for Palestinians in Gaza, trapped inside their blockaded enclave as the international community looks on.
On October 14, Israel said it conducted a “precision strike” on a Hamas command centre operating near Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, a coastal city in central Gaza. Dozens of families like the Dalous, forced to flee their homes, had set up tents in a parking lot inside the hospital compound. They had hoped that international laws forbidding most attacks on medical facilities would ensure their safety.
The Israeli military said that the fire that erupted afterward was probably caused by “secondary explosions,” without specifying what that meant. It added that “the incident is under review”.
As fire consumed the Dalou family’s tent, al-Dalou’s father, Ahmed, ran back inside. He carried his young son, and then his two older daughters, out to safety. By the time he turned back, it was too late for his eldest son.
“I could see him, sitting there, he was lifting his finger and praying,” he said, referring to the Muslim shahada, a creed of faith recited upon birth and at death. “I called out to him: ‘Shaaban, forgive me, son! Forgive me! I can’t do anything.’”
Al-Dalou died the day before his 20th birthday. The moment of his death was not only seared into his father’s memory – it was circulated around the world.
The images of people in that camp burning alive, among them also al-Dalou’s mother, prodded even Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States, to question that attack.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said Wednesday that she had “watched in horror as images from central Gaza poured across my screen”.
“There are no words, simply no words, to describe what we saw,” she said in a statement to the United Nations. “Israel has a responsibility to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, even if Hamas was operating near the hospital.”
The video of the burning body, which the family identified as al-Dalou, was geolocated by The New York Times to the location of the camp in Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Al-Dalou, who had become sickly from trauma and malnutrition amid the ever-worsening siege, often confided in his aunt, Karbahan al-Dalou, about his ideas for escaping Gaza.
“His plan was to get himself out, and then find a way to get out his sisters and his brothers and his parents,” she said in an interview with the Times, as she sat in the hospital room of her daughter Tasnim, who was recovering from shrapnel injuries to her stomach from the same strike.
Al-Dalou also turned to the internet, contacting activists abroad who have helped Gaza residents set up fundraising pages online.
“You have to open your heart for us. I am nineteen and I buried my dreams,” he wrote in one Instagram post. “Support me to find them again!”
The campaign raised more than US$20,000 ($33,000). But even if it had been enough to pay the exorbitant fees to arrange an escape out of Gaza for him and some of his relatives, the effort was futile: Since May, Israel has closed the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, making such exits impossible.
In a text exchange from May that his aunt showed the Times, al-Dalou asked her if his recurrent illnesses might qualify him for a medical evacuation, which have occasionally taken place. She replied that it was unlikely, and that even a friend “whose sister lost an eye, they are struggling to find a way to get her out”.
Yet she said her nephew, who often joined her in her tent for lunch, seemed unflappable. He would watch the news, analyse speeches by Israel’s Prime Minister, and tell her: “Be optimistic, all will be well. God willing, God will help us, auntie,” she recalled.
It was a different story among his friends, said his cousin and schoolmate Mohyeddin al-Dalou. During the war, the two often whiled away wistful evenings on the beach.
Shaaban al-Dalou used to spin dreams of going abroad to get a doctorate in software engineering, which he had studied in his last two years at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. He had forsaken his ambition to become a doctor, his cousin said, because his family could not afford the cost of those studies.
As the war dragged on, he said, al-Dalou’s vision of escape transformed from travelling to dying.
“More and more, he would tell me that he wanted to be martyred, he wanted to be with his friends who were martyred, with his grandfather and grandmother in heaven,” he said.
Just 10 days before the attack that killed him, al-Dalou had a brush with death when Israel struck the mosque near the hospital, where he had been reciting the Quran and spent the night. Israel also said at that time that it was targeting a Hamas command centre.
In that blast, which local authorities said killed 26 people, a piece of shrapnel cut across al-Dalou’s neck, behind his ear. “His stitches hadn’t even been removed yet,” his aunt said, breaking down into sobs.
In a social media post after the mosque strike, al-Dalou described waking up in the hospital, shouting to the medics that he had reached heaven with a friend, Anas al-Zarad.
Al-Dalou appeared especially tormented in recent posts over the recent death of that friend, posting pictures of them together as boys and teenagers, laughing and joking.
“I’ve never felt anything more terrifying than the thought of the dead being absent,” he wrote in one post. “The human mind, with all its brain cells and all of its capacity to absorb and to create, is helpless in the face of this absence.”
Those who now face that same rupture in al-Dalou’s absence recall a young man far wiser than his years, whose ambition and energy seemed boundless, and who made everyone his friend.
Karbahan al-Dalou remembered the way his mother, Alaa, had treated Shaaban al-Dalou “more like her brother than her son,” with lots of teasing and intimate conversations.
Al-Dalou’s mother once sold her gold bracelets to fund his high school studies. When the war began last year, his aunt said, al-Dalou used the money he earned working in software engineering online to buy them back for her.
She said al-Dalou also used his money to help his father and uncle, Karbahan’s husband, set up a falafel stand by their tent outside the hospital, as a way to earn money after the two brothers’ small clothing factory was destroyed in the war.
Al-Dalou’s father said he saw their relationship as something beyond that of father and son.
“He kept my secrets, and I kept his,” he said, his face and arms heavily bandaged from burns. “We were friends, and I was proud of that.”
As he stood watching the fire that took his wife and son’s lives, he said he kept speaking to his son: “I told Shaaban that I’ve never felt so broken the way I feel broken now. I’ve never felt so defeated like I feel defeated now.”
His last memory of them is from a day before the fire. The three of them had gone to the beach, chewing sunflower seeds and chatting. “Now, well,” he said, “God rest his soul.”
On Friday, Ahmed al-Dalou was dealt another blow: his youngest son, 10, died from the severity of his burn injuries despite his father’s efforts to rescue him. He was buried alongside his mother and his brother.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Bilal Shbair and Erika Solomon
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Two Danish citizens and an American have also reportedly died.