He was the son his mother was proud of. He memorized the Quran as a boy and rose to the top of his university class. he wanted to be a doctor. But most of all, Shaaban Aldarou dreamed of escape.
Since Israel launched its devastating retaliation against the Hamas-led attacks just a year ago, Aldarou has written impassioned pleas on social media, posted videos from his family’s small plastic tent and told the world: A GoFundMe page has even been set up asking for help. We will help you escape from the Gaza Strip.
Instead, the world watched him burn to death.
Al-Darrow, 19, is seen waving his arms helplessly as he is engulfed in flames in a video that has become a symbol of the horrors of war for Gazans trapped in the blockaded international conference enclave. was identified by the family. The community is watching.
On October 14, Israel announced a “precision strike” against a Hamas command center operating near the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the coastal city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. Duluth and dozens of other family members who were forced to evacuate their homes pitched tents in a parking lot on the hospital grounds. They had hoped that international law, which prohibits most attacks on medical facilities, would ensure their safety.
The Israeli military said the fire that ensued was probably caused by a “secondary explosion,” but did not say what that meant. It added: “This incident is under investigation.”
When Darrow’s family’s tent caught fire, Al-Darrow’s father, Ahmed, ran back inside. He took his young son and then his two older daughters to safety. By the time he turned back, it was already too late for the eldest son.
“I saw him sitting there with his fingers raised in prayer,” she said, referring to the Islamic shahada, the faith’s creed that is recited at birth and death. “I called out to him: ‘Shaaban, forgive me, son!’ Forgive me! I can’t do anything.”
Mr. Aldarou died the day before his 20th birthday. The moment of his death was not only seared into his father’s memory, but also spread around the world.
Images of people being burned alive inside the camp, including Mr. Aldarou’s mother, have led even Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States, to question the attack.
“I watched in horror as images from central Gaza streamed onto my screen,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Wednesday.
“There are no words, no words at all, to describe what we saw,” she said in a statement to the United Nations. “Even if Hamas operates near hospitals, Israel has a responsibility to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties.”
A video of a burned corpse, identified by his family as al-Darrow, was located by the New York Times in a detention center at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Amid the worsening siege, al-Darrow, who was in poor health from trauma and malnutrition, would often confide in his aunt, Kalbahan al-Darrow, ideas for escaping Gaza.
“His plan was to get himself out and then find a way to get his sisters, brothers and parents out,” she said in an interview with The Times, sitting in her daughter Tasnim’s hospital room. He is recovering from shrapnel injuries to his abdomen from the same attack.
Aldalou also turned to the internet, contacting activists abroad who have helped Gazans set up online fundraising pages.
“You have to open your heart to us. I’m 19 years old and I buried my dreams,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “Please help me find it again!”
The campaign raised more than $20,000. But even if it was enough to get him and some of his relatives out of Gaza at exorbitant cost, the effort was in vain. Since May, Israel has closed the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, making such an escape impossible.
In a text message from May that his aunt showed to the Times, Mr. Aldarou asked her whether his recurring illness would qualify him for a medical evacuation. Medical evacuations occurred occasionally. She replied that it was unlikely and that “even my friend whose sister lost an eye is having trouble finding a way to rescue her.”
Still, she said, her nephew, who often joined her for lunch in her tent, seemed unfazed. He watched the news, analyzed the Israeli Prime Minister’s speech, and said to her: God willing, God will help us, Auntie,” she recalled.
His cousin and schoolmate Mohyeddin al-Darrow said the story was different among his friends. During the war, the two often spent melancholy nights on the beach.
Mr. Aldarou once had a dream of going abroad to earn a Ph.D. He completed his PhD in Software Engineering in the past two years at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. According to his cousin, he had already abandoned his ambition to become a doctor because his family could not afford the cost of such study.
As the war dragged on, Al Darrow’s vision of escape changed from travel to death, he said.
“He told me more and more that he wanted to be martyred, to be with his martyred friends, his grandfather and grandmother in heaven,” he said.
Just 10 days before the deadly attack, al-Darrow came close to death when Israeli forces raided a mosque near the hospital where he had spent the night reciting the Quran. Israel also said at the time that it was targeting Hamas headquarters.
In the explosion, which local authorities said killed 26 people, a piece of shrapnel sliced Mr. Al Darrow’s neck, behind his ear. “His stitches weren’t even removed yet,” his aunt said, breaking down in tears.
In a social media post after the mosque strike, al-Darou said he woke up in the hospital and cried to doctors that he and his friend Anas al-Zarad had reached heaven.
Mr Aldarou appeared particularly distressed about his friend’s recent death in recent posts, posting photos of them laughing and joking together as boys and teenagers.
“I have never felt so horrified as the idea that there are no dead,” he wrote in one post. “The human mind, with all its brain cells and the ability to absorb and create everything, is powerless in the face of this absence.”
Those facing the same rupture in Al Darrow’s absence remember a young man who was much wiser than he was then, whose ambition and energy seemed boundless, and who became everyone’s friend.
His aunt, Al Darrow, recalled that his mother, Alaa, treated him “more like a brother than a son,” with lots of teasing and intimate conversations.
Aldarou’s mother once sold gold bracelets to pay for high school tuition. When the war broke out last year, Mr. Aldarou bought them back to her using money he earned from an online software engineering job, his aunt said.
She said that Mr. Aldarou, Mr. Culvahan’s husband, and his uncle had rented a tent outside the hospital as a way to make money after a small clothing factory run by the two brothers was destroyed. He said he also used his own money to help set up a falafel stand nearby. war.
Aldarou’s father said he considered their relationship to be more than that of father and son.
“He kept my secret and I kept his,” he said, his face and arms heavily bandaged from burns. “We were friends and proud of it.”
As he watched the fire that claimed the lives of his wife and son, he continued to tell Aldarou: I have never felt more defeated than I do now. ”
His last memory of them was the day before the fire. The three of them went to the beach, chewing sunflower seeds and chatting. “Okay, well,” he said. “May God rest his soul.”
On Friday, the eldest son, Al Darrow, suffered another blow. The youngest son, aged 10, died from severe burns despite his father’s rescue efforts. He was buried with his mother and younger brother.
Arijeta Lajka contributed reporting.
