Ibrahim al-Aqqad’s ink has outlived him. On many streets in Khan Younis and its refugee camp, the elegant strokes of his calligraphy still grace shop signs.
Just four months ago, amid the destruction, he hand-painted the name of my sister’s husband’s pharmacy: al-Aqqad Pharmacy.
Earlier this month, Ibrahim, aged 54, a father of six, was killed alongside his wife, children and extended family – 26 members in total – when an Israeli air strike flattened their four-storey home without warning.
The strike wiped out three generations of the Aqqad family in a single attack.
Ibrahim’s story is one of thousands in Gaza, including my own, where entire families are being systematically annihilated, killed with precision in their homes, tents, on the roads, and in the ruined hospitals and schools repurposed as shelters.
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The Aqqad family – farmers, teachers, calligraphers, students, children, grandparents – once tended the olive trees on land that had been in their family for generations.
They are now only memories buried beneath the ruins of Khan Younis, a city transformed – like all of Gaza – into a graveyard of families.
Systematic killings
In Gaza, death follows people wherever they go.
No place is safe, and no profession offers protection – not even for those supposedly shielded by international humanitarian law.
Each morning, my sister and her husband, both pharmacists serving in Khan Younis, hug their children, bracing for the possibility that it may be their final goodbye
Health professionals – doctors, pharmacists, nurses and medics – go to work each day knowing they may not return.
Each morning, my sister and her husband, a relative of Ibrahim, both pharmacists serving in Khan Younis, hug their children, bracing for the possibility that it may be their final goodbye.
On 3 April, Ibrahim’s 80-year-old father, Hajj Muhammad al-Aqqad, decided with his sons and their families to evacuate their home in the Manara neighbourhood of Khan Younis and head to al-Mawasi – a so-called safe zone that has become a death trap.
When they found no space to pitch a tent, they sent some belongings to relatives in eastern Khan Younis – where my sister lives – in preparation to move in nearby. That morning, my sister saw the Aqqad children carrying their possessions, not knowing it would be the last time she would see them alive.
The following day, on 4 April, a strike hit their four-storey home, killing 25 family members.
Among them were Ibrahim; his wife, Samah (45); and their six children – Abdel Hamid (18), Abdullah (16), Aisha (23), Shaimaa (20), Hoda (15), and Shams (13). His brother Muath (51), Muath’s wife Heba (41), and their nine children – Mohamed (21), Asmaa (20), twin girls Banan and Basma (19), Sa’ad (18), Maryam (16), Fatima (15), Abdul Rahman (13), and Tasneem (11) – were also killed.
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Ibrahim’s third brother, Ahmad, lost his wife Rasha (40) and their three children – Mu’ayyad (7), Dareen (11), and Wateen (5). Only two young daughters survived – one lost her legs, the other sustained serious injuries. Both now cling to life in Gaza’s European Hospital, one of the last still-functioning medical facilities after Israel’s destruction of 34 hospitals and clinics.
Ibrahim’s father, Hajj Muhammad, a farmer, was seriously injured. His wife, Aisha (75), was killed. One surviving son, studying in Saudi Arabia, received the news alone – shattered by the distance and the unimaginable loss.
A pattern
The massacre of the Aqqad family is not an aberration. It is part of a pattern.
The recent release of a harrowing video documenting the final moments of 15 Gaza medics murdered while trying to save lives has exposed the brutal reality – and the denials – of this genocide.
The paramedics, in clearly marked uniforms and lit-up ambulances, were obliterated as they responded to emergency calls. Their execution, like that of more than 1,000 other health workers, is yet another war crime denied by the Israeli establishment.
The footage confirms what Gaza’s people have long known: to be Palestinian is to be rendered expendable by the Zionist regime. Palestinian life is the target.
This is not just war or genocide – it is the deliberate dismantling of the core of Palestinian life: family, care, memory, and children – the future. As a third-generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Gaza’s camps, I can testify to this reality.
Even as the world commemorated World Children’s Day on 20 November, Gaza was burying its own.
In December 2023, Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, declared: “The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”
That already grim reality has only grown more dire. Since October 2023, more than 15,000 Palestinian children have been killed, over 34,000 injured, and nearly a million displaced and deprived of basic services – including 825 under the age of one. At least 274 were born and killed during this war, while over 39,000 children have been orphaned.
Since 18 March – a day on which 183 children in Gaza were massacred – at least 600 children have been killed and 1,600 injured.
Expendable lives
Palestinians ask: if these numbers – thousands of murdered children, newborns buried before they lived, tens of thousands orphaned – do not compel the world to act, what will?
For the Aqqad family, digging through rubble to find their children’s bodies, the answer has long been clear: the world does not see Palestinian children as worth saving.
Gaza has slipped from the headlines, eclipsed by debates over military aid and defence budgets. But Ibrahim and his family – like thousands of others erased in this genocide – stand as a searing indictment of every dollar funnelled into the so-called defence industry.
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Those funds should instead be redirected to the International Criminal Court to prosecute Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies as war criminals at The Hague.
In December 2023, Israeli air strikes destroyed my sister’s home and pharmacy. In the face of that loss, she and her neighbours built a kiosk to meet basic medical needs. Ibrahim had volunteered to paint its sign.
That sign still stands. He does not.
And yet, amid the rubble, Gaza resists. Ibrahim’s calligraphy still adorns the streets. The olive trees on the Aqqad’s ancestral land endure – likely tended by neighbours after the family’s death.
My sister still walks to the clinic each day to save lives. Her husband, atop the ruins of their pharmacy, continues to serve his people.
In every medic who runs towards danger, every parent who dares to hope, every child who dreams, Gaza says to the world: we are still here. We remember everything. We will never forget.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
