Daniel Wolfram
According to reports, at least 1,369 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire took effect in October.
On a quiet afternoon in northern Gaza City, a teenager was heading home from school. Then, an explosion shook the street.
Fifteen-year-old Mohammad Abdul Zinati ran towards the smoke after hearing a wounded man call for help outside a local shop.
The person lying on the road was paramedic Sharif Shadi Labad.
Witness Tamer Lubbad captured footage as a crowd rushed to assist. “We found a man lying on the ground. He was still alive and calling for help,” Lubbad said, according to The Guardian.
Warning came too late
Watching from nearby, Mohammad Abdul’s cousin Mohammed Rajeh Zinati spotted a drone flying towards him and desperately tried to yell out a warning to his cousin.
“I started shouting: ‘Run! Get away!'” the cousin recalled. But it was too late.
As Mohammad reached Sharif, the paramedic, a second missile plunged from the sky at the same place as the first drone, killing the teenager instantly. That is also known as a double-tap strike.
“Mohammad was hit directly in the chest and abdomen and was killed almost instantly. I couldn’t do anything to rescue him,” his cousin told The Guardian.
Eyes in the sky
Mohammad is remembered as a gentle boy who often made sure to get extra water for his elders in the neighbourhood. “He was a kind, helpful, polite and respectful boy,” his cousin added.
Military experts argue that the tragedy in Gaza raises serious questions about drone operations by Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Trevor Ball, a journalist and researcher, explained that the drone deployed a Mikholit glide bomb equipped with high-definition cameras that let the drone operators see their surroundings clearly.
The Israeli military stated that Sharif Shadi Labad was not a medic, but a Hamas militant.
While the IDF did not explain why the drone was deployed near a minor, they stated that the military “is aware of reports indicating that an uninvolved individual was harmed as a result of the strike targeting the terrorist, regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and makes every effort to minimise such harm.”
Kids are getting killed at an alarming rate in Gaza
The tragedy of the death of an innocent teenager is not an isolated incident in Gaza.
According to an Instagram post by Unicef, over the past two weeks, there have been at least six instances where kids have been killed during airstrikes and gunfire, including a pregnant woman with her unborn child.
“Every child must be protected. The killing must stop,” Unicef writes in the post.
