From the eldest to the youngest: Gaza’s heartbreaking toll
6 Min Read
The Guardian traces the families of a 101-year-old great-great-grandfather and a two-hour old baby girl killed by "Israel".
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Blood can be seen in the aftermath of the Israeli occupation airstrike on a UN-run school that killed dozens of Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, on July 6, 2024. (AP)
Around September 17, Gaza's Health Ministry identified 34,344 Palestinians killed by Israeli and released a detailed list with names, ages, genders, and ID numbers, covering over 80% of the victims thus far.
The Guardian used this list to trace the families of two of the victims: the oldest, a 101-year-old man, and one of the youngest, a newborn baby girl who lived for two hours only.
A century of resilience under the Israeli occupation
Ahmed al-Tahrawi, born in 1922 in al-Masmiyya—a village now reduced to ruins and marked only by an Israeli road junction—had his life profoundly changed by the Nakba of 1948. At the age of 26, he and his family were forcibly displaced during the catastrophe, which forced around 700,000 Palestinians from their homes.
“They left on foot, carrying little more than the key to the village home they would never see again,” said his grandson, Abd al-Rahman al-Tahrawi. Tragically, his two young sons did not survive the flight into exile. Ahmed and his wife rebuilt their lives from scratch in the al-Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, always keeping the key to their old home as a symbol of their lost life.
Tahrawi worked as a tailor and eventually opened a small shop, raising generations of his family. He lived long enough to meet his great-great-grandchildren and remained sharp until his final days. In a family video recorded just months before the war, at the age of 100, he is seen trying to say “I love you” in English to his wife. As he repeats the unfamiliar words with a smile, laughter fills the room. Behind him, the key to their lost home still hangs on the wall.
“He was going to leave us soon, but he did not go the normal way,” his grandson reflected.
Tahrawi lived in a modest single-storey home in al-Bureij, with a corrugated asbestos roof. When the Israeli war on Gaza began, he sought refuge at his daughter’s house, believing its concrete roof would offer better protection from Israeli airstrikes. However, on 23 October, "Israel" bombed her home, killing 12 people instantly and injuiring eight others, including Tahrawi. He was taken to the hospital with internal bleeding, but due to the overwhelming number of patients and scarce medical supplies, doctors prioritized treating the young.
He passed away a week later, leaving his family devastated. “My grandfather did not belong to any military organisation, and he wasn’t guilty of any crime,” his grandson said. “He was just an old man who couldn’t harm anybody.”
At the start of the brutal Israeli war, Tahrawi had 126 living descendants, but only 90 remain alive this year. When he died, his oldest grandchild was 53 and his eldest great-great-grandchild was five.
Abd al-Rahman al-Tahrawi, the 26-year-old grandson, is in the middle of the large family, the same age his grandfather was when he was forcibly displaced to Gaza. The horrors his grandfather spoke of in old stories have now become Abd al-Rahman’s reality. The family has been displaced six times within Gaza, and he no longer has his grandfather for comfort or guidance.
“When I lost my grandfather, I felt very sad, an extreme emptiness,” he said. “I was his favourite. I’ll miss him and his stories of adventures, his gatherings, and the sound of his laughter.”
A mother's final embrace and her daughter's brief life
Waad had not yet been born when an Israeli airstrike struck, burying her mother, Salam al-Sabah, beneath a mountain of debris. On February 15, "Israel" bombed a neighbor’s home, but the blast was so powerful that it also destroyed parts of the Sabah family house.
Rescue teams hurried to the scene, but without heavy machinery, it took over an hour to free Salam, who was nine months pregnant. Already a mother to four boys, she had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of her first daughter in just a few days.
Eid Sabah, her uncle by marriage and the director of nursing at Kamal Adwan hospital, was on duty when the injured family members arrived, so caked in dust and ash from the explosion that he didn’t initially recognize them.
“I only realized who they were when some of them began screaming my name. I froze in shock for a moment, but then gathered myself enough to start checking on them,” he recalled.
It was too late for Salam, but her unborn daughter, Waad, was still holding on. Doctors performed an emergency caesarean and rushed Waad to intensive care, where she survived for only two hours.
“What saddened me the most was receiving both Waad's birth certificate and her death certificate at the same time,” Eid Sabah said. He added that both mother and daughter might have survived if they had received medical attention sooner.
They were laid to rest together, wrapped in a single shroud, with Salam cradling Waad, and buried in a shared grave beside Salam’s 11-year-old son, Asid.
The family had initially forcibly displaced from their home in northern Tal al-Zaatar. They spent months moving between relatives' homes and shelters for displaced people, a struggle that mirrored the stories Salam heard from her grandparents, who had been forcibly displaced from the village of Burayr in 1948 and settled in Jabaliya refugee camp.
Salam was five months pregnant with Waad when the Israeli war broke out, and the constant moving became increasingly difficult. After Israeli invading forces pulled out of their area, the family returned to their damaged home, believing it would be safer to stay.
Then, on 15 February, an Israeli bomb struck a nearby property without warning. "The house they hit was empty," Eid said. "They could have warned the neighboring homes to evacuate. If they had, my relatives would still be alive, and Waad would have been filling the house with the sounds of her laughter and crying."
