Bilal el-Essi

Days before he was killed, Bilal el-Essi shared a photograph with his friends and family: a man’s body sprawled under a woman’s bicycle in a Gaza City street, a child’s pink backpack fallen from its basket. The man had been killed trying to find food for his family. Bilal knew that pain from the inside — northern Gaza was starving, and feeding the people you love had become the most dangerous work there was.

When word spread that a rare aid delivery might reach northern Gaza in the early hours of Thursday 29 February 2024, Bilal went to the seafront Al Rashid Road with two of his brothers, his cousin Moataz el-Essi told the Guardian. He was twenty-eight, football-mad, quick with a joke. Hundreds of people huddled around small fires in the bitter cold, waiting for the trucks. Around 4:30 in the morning, the photographer Shukri Fleifel watched two Israeli tanks come down Al Rashid Road firing into the air to disperse the crowds — and then, as people rushed toward the arriving flour, the firing turned into the crowd itself.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health said at least 112 people were killed and more than 750 wounded that morning; the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called it a cold-blooded massacre. Bilal was among the dead. His family, his cousin said, were heartbroken that they had not stopped him going out to look for food — a sentence in which the whole condition of northern Gaza in that winter is contained: the people who loved him could imagine no safety, only the choice between hunger at home and gunfire at the shore.

Sources

• Killed trying to keep his family alive: one man’s death at Gaza aid convoy — The Guardian
• ‘Massacre’: Dozens killed by Israeli fire in Gaza while collecting food aid — Al Jazeera