The Electronic Intifada 28 October 2025
Fares Jaber was displaced and trying to provide for his family before Israel killed him. (Photo courtesy of the author)
On 18 May 2025, around 9 am, I left my tent in Khan Younis and headed towards Nuseirat to meet Fares Jaber, 32.
Fares was from Jabaliya refugee camp, but after Israel destroyed his home in October 2024, he fled with his family to Nuseirat, where I met him.
I was interviewing Fares as part of my work to document testimonies from people in Gaza who receive support from the organization I work for.
At the time, after Israel had already isolated Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, from Khan Younis and ordered the complete evacuation of Khan Younis, rumors began circulating that the Israeli army planned to cut off Khan Younis from the central area – Deir al-Balah, Maghazi, al-Bureij, al-Zawayda and Nuseirat.
The situation was perilous, but I pushed aside the idea of calling Fares and decided to meet him in person – I wanted to see his face, to read the expressions behind his words.
Fares spoke quietly when we met. His voice was heavy with exhaustion.
“I’m the sole provider for four,” he said. “And today, I’m expecting a baby girl.”
Fares did not smile as he spoke, but there was tenderness in his tone – the pride of a father already in love with his unborn daughter.
“I will name her Razan,” he added, pausing briefly.
He explained that the name was to honor his mother, who had always dreamed of having a granddaughter named Razan.
I joked lightly, “You’re definitely her favorite son now, right?”
Fares lowered his eyes. There was a long silence.
“My mother passed away during the famine in the north,” he finally said.
I froze, embarrassed by my remark, then whispered a prayer for her soul.
Fares remained composed, recounting how famine had spread widely across northern Gaza around mid-March 2024 and dragged on for months.
“I lost 26 kilos during the famine,” he said.
By June, people were eating tree leaves to survive. They mixed whatever they could find – barley, wheat or bird feed.
“My mother suffered so much from eating corn and wheat,” Fares recalled. “In the end, she passed away.”
When he received the news of her death, he collapsed – then buried her under continuous Israeli bombardment.
In October 2024, Israel destroyed Fares’s home in Jabaliya during its campaign to seize northern Gaza.
He fled to Gaza City, but couldn’t find shelter for his wife, Yusra, and their two children, Atta, 5, and Katia, 3.
Fares decided that Yusra would take the children to her family’s home in Nuseirat while he remained in the north with his relatives.
A month later, in November, he made the difficult decision to flee south and reunite with his family.
“Do you regret that decision?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, swallowing hard. “It was too brutal. But I did it for my children – to stay near them and keep them safe. I love them.”
When he arrived in Nuseirat, Atta and Katia ran into his arms, dancing with joy.
Before I left, I asked Fares where he hoped to be once the genocide ended.
Without hesitation, he said, “I just want to go back to our sand, to our home in the north.”
“Would you return?” I asked.
“Even if there’s nothing left but sand,” he replied, “I’d still go back.”
When I left him that day, Fares was anxious as his wife was in the hospital, awaiting the birth of their daughter, Razan.
An unidentified martyr
On 19 July 2025, I woke up feeling somehow energetic and excited. I had a field mission that day at a community kitchen in Deir al-Balah.
We were going to provide food for displaced children – work that, to me, felt like the only meaningful thing to do during those times of widespread starvation.
The first thing I did was to check the news on my phone, praying for a ceasefire – a habit I developed throughout the genocide.
When I opened Telegram, instead of ceasefire updates, my feed was flooded with photos of unidentified martyrs – faces no one could recognize.
People post such photos in the hope that someone will identify them, so their families can be notified.
It is a desperate final attempt to spare them an anonymous burial – to let them be mourned, named and remembered – while their loved ones still cling to the faint hope that they might be alive, imprisoned or buried somewhere unknown.
I scrolled through the faces, whispering peace to each, until one photo stopped me: a man lying on the floor of Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat, his mouth half open, eyes half closed, dried blood staining his shirt.
Even through the screen, I could feel the cold weight of his body.
Every moment without a ceasefire, I thought, was another life lost.
I then got up, prepared for the day and took a taxi from Khan Younis to Deir al-Balah, arriving around 9 am.
In the kitchen, two of my colleagues were chatting, exchanging updates – who had been injured or killed recently, which house had been bombed and where the Israeli army had advanced.
Ahmad Aldirawi, one of my colleagues who had been with me when I interviewed Fares on 18 May, turned to me and said, “Eman, do you know who was killed yesterday? Fares.”
At first, I couldn’t recall him, but Ahmad insisted I did.
“Fares – the one you interviewed two months ago,” he said, showing me the same photo I had seen that morning – the unknown martyr whose image had stopped me.
I froze, staring at the photo again, unable to breathe for several seconds.
A storm of thoughts crowded my mind.
The same mind that had once insisted on meeting Fares in person to capture his expressions had failed to recognize him now.
Fares was killed by Israeli shrapnel in Nuseirat while collecting firewood to sell. He left behind his wife, Yusra, and their three children: Atta, 5, Katia, 3, and Razan, just 2 months old.
A knight
After learning of Fares’s killing, I felt an overwhelming urge to visit his wife, Yusra, and offer my condolences.
A week later, on 27 July, I managed to see her at her family’s home in Nuseirat.
I was hesitant at first. I had only known her late husband as a beneficiary.
But Yusra received me with patience and quiet strength.
She smiled faintly and spoke in a steady voice as I expressed my condolences.
“Fares was a very unique person, truly someone worth grieving,” she said. “Everyone who knew him, even for just a single day, mourned him.”
Yusra told me that in his final months, Fares was utterly exhausted.
“He slept little, waking early to find anything he could bring to us to the extent that his legs suffered from arthritis from the endless work,” she said.
“Maybe death was easier than this life for him.”
Tears welled in her eyes.
She went on to tell me how deeply he loved their children.
“Sometimes I wouldn’t see Atta all day,” she said with a faint smile. “He followed his father everywhere. I used to feel jealous, as if Atta had forgotten all about me.”
Now, Atta tells people that his father is only sleeping and will return soon.
Before he fled southward, she said, Fares bought Razan clothes and small toys from the north, preparing for her birth.
He searched tirelessly for vitamins and vegetables for Yusra during the pregnancy.
After Razan’s birth, she said, Fares rarely put her down.
At home, Fares carried Razan everywhere, Yusra said. He played with Katia and doted on Atta. The children adored him.
Her voice wavered. “If it wasn’t for my children, I would have completely collapsed,” she said. “Can you imagine what I feel after all these years with him?”
I didn’t know what to say. Words felt useless in the face of her grief.
Then she added, “I hate everything now. Everything is tasteless and colorless.”
Her words shattered me. Tears blurred my vision.
As I left Yusra’s home, I thought about how we Palestinians are fated to live in sorrow – to survive on it when our homes are destroyed, or to be buried with it when Israel kills us.
The name Fares in Arabic means “knight.”
Fares was indeed that – a noble man who provided for his family with courage and resolve.
But Israel killed Fares while he was simply trying to provide for them.
Eman Alastal is a creative content and copywriter based in Gaza. She works with a humanitarian organization that distributes aid.
