Last updated on October 22nd, 2024 at 04:11 pm
Warning: Vivid video, images, and imagery through writing. It’s hard, but we must tell his story and share it with the world.
Honestly, harrowingly, what to say. After a year of bombing, maiming, starving, killing Palestinians, mostly children, Israel just burned alive before the world a sleeping, wounded, 19-year-old software engineering student attached to an IV in a tent he had built for his incessantly displaced family.
“All of Gaza will starve.” —Israeli Military Leaders
Video shows Sha’ban Al Dalou amidst an inferno, “a body writhing, crackling, a raised arm, reaching out for help.” He died two days before his 20th birthday. A Gazan’s vow: “May his death awaken us.”
Israel’s genocide lurches on, despite the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and American assertions it represents a “day-after” chance to “bring about a better day for the people of Gaza” – a claim one analyst dismisses as bitterly, bloodily “laughable…There is no day after.”
With Netanyahu making it clear his slaughter is “not over” and likely never will be, many Israeli military leaders are now reportedly looking to an infamous “Generals,’” or Eiland Plan, that calls for ethnically cleansing the northern Gaza Strip by wholly besieging the area and halting all humanitarian aid with the ignominious resolution, “All of Gaza will starve.”
Anticipating legal or moral challenges, Israeli officials who’ve already spent month after month carrying out a gruesome war on children – killing them in hospitals, mosques, their homes, their mothers’ arms, their cars as they try to escape, under long, slow, suffocating rubble – are evidently prepared to argue such actions are “legitimate and permitted under the strictest international law.”
Little wonder Israel this week launched its sixth U.S.-funded bombing of Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah – yet more war crimes – hitting a courtyard where hungry, displaced, often wounded Palestinians were sheltering in makeshift tents.
Among them was Sha’ban Al Dalou, his parents, two brothers and two sisters, who since the start of the Israeli assault have had to flee five times after leaving their Gaza City home. A student at al-Azhar University until Israel destroyed it in November, Sha’ban, 19, was documenting online “this barbaric starvation war” and the hardships his family and others faced – homeless, inadequate food or water, no medicine, and now freezing weather; as he spoke, Israeli drones hummed in the background.
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A good boy and the eldest child, Sha’ban had built his family a tent against the cold; he also started a GoFundMe – “From Despair to Hope – so they could flee to Egypt. “In Gaza, dreams go to die,” he wrote. “Each displacement leaves behind another fragment of our shattered souls.”
Before the war, Sha’ban loved playing guitar, and dreamed of becoming a doctor; his parents liked to boast he’d also memorized the Quran. In the encampment amidst Israeli bombs dropping, he donated blood, volunteered at an open-air clinic, and often walked around the camp looking for an Internet signal to continue his studies. Time after time, he escaped death.
On October 6, he was praying at a nearby mosque when it was hit by another U.S.-made bomb launched by Israel; it killed at least 20 people and buried Sha’ban beneath rubble, but bystanders dug him out: “I saw death in my eyes,” he wrote. “They took me out of the rubble; I was bleeding, injured – all like a dream.”
He was taken to Al-Aqsa for head and lung injuries, got 11 stitches behind one ear, and returned to his family tent where they put him on an intravenous drip. He was asleep the night of Oct. 14 when Israeli bombed the courtyard, setting off an inferno, reportedly from gas cooking canisters sparking secondary explosions, that tore through the encampment.
Ghastly video posted by eyewitnesses shows Sha’ban in fiery silhouette, his raised arm still connected to his IV, screaming, twisting, frantically trying to free himself. Some in the crowd held back his 16-year-old brother, straining to reach into the fire to help: “The one in the video is my brother Sha’ban. He was yelling, ‘Someone save me!'”
Their father Ahmed al-Dalou, who was badly burned but survived, later said he’d rushed to rescue his younger children but thought Sha’ban could get out on his own. The fire killed Sha’ban and his mother, Umm Sha’baan, 38, and at least three others; over 65 were wounded.
Several days later, Sha’ban’s 10-year-old brother Abdul also died of his injuries.
At his funeral, their bandaged father mourned his young son. “There is no consciousness or humanity,” he wailed.
“My little boy. He was not guilty.”
On Wednesday, which would have been Sha’ban’s 20th birthday, Ahmed said, “Sha’ban will be celebrating his birthday with his mother in heaven.” And, now, his younger brother.
The video of Sha’ban engulfed in flames, his trapped arm held high, has been viewed millions of times. Amidst widespread outrage, an Israeli army spokesman said, without offering any evidence, the hospital was a Hamas “command and control center” and they had “executed a precise strike on terrorists.” The claim rang grotesquely hollow.
“This is Zionism. This is Israel defending itself,” wrote Dilly Hussain above images of the searing flames engulfing Sha’ban.
“Funded and armed by the U.S. and diplomatically protected by the West” – “day after day.” Many responses came in rage. Said activist Philip Proudfoot, who recalled Sha’ban as “a kind person with dreams of living a normal life,”
for the rest of their lives.”
The righteous fury was often aptly aimed at a complicit America that has not just funded the slaughter, but publicly applauded its major author. “They’re burning people alive,” wrote Sonny Bill Williams, “but some of you are still scared to speak out.”
Hours after the footage surfaced, over 500 Jews and allies shut down the New York Stock Exchange, center of global capital, to demand the US stop arming Israel and profiting from genocide under moral cover of Jewish “safety…In horror and agony, we refuse to let our histories, identities and traditions be used (to) massacre Palestinians.”
They noted the only condition placed on $18 billion in US funds for Israel is not how those bombs are used, but where they’re bought – from US arms manufacturers now posting “staggering” profits, many of which go to members of Congress.
Among over 200 people arrested at the action were descendants of Holocaust survivors. The entire family of Elena Stein, of Jewish Voice For Peace, was massacred in their Lithuania shtetl; only her grandmother, who wasn’t home, survived.
“Where were the neighbors?” asks Stein. “As the NYPD dragged me out by my arms and legs, I felt my Jewish ancestors at my back… We say now, with more conviction than ever, we refuse to be neighbors who just stand by.”
After a year of genocide livestreamed to the world, some hope “this particular horror,” the grisly sight of Sha’ban “tethered to an IV as U.S.-supplied Israeli bombs ignite fires around him,” may break through the noise – an awful defining image, like the mutilated face of Emmett Till his mother resolutely showed to the world or the weeping Napalm Girl of the Vietnam War, that “brings us back to our common humanity.”
“This is what we need now for Gaza,” says Zak Witus. “We need to see and to believe.” “His name was Sha’ban,” wrote Dr. Omar Suleima. “He was loved by his family and friends, a memorizer of the Quran. He was named after the month in the Islamic tradition that is referred to as the forgotten month. His name was Sha’ban. Let him never be forgotten.”
Dr. Jennifer Cassidy echoed him:
“Say his name – Sha’ban. The man, the human, the soul behind the photo seen around the world. The word war crime doesn’t begin to cover this. He is not a number. His name was Sha’ban. May he rest in peace and rise in power.”
