Rakan al-Najjar

Rakan Hamdi Yahya al-Najjar, ten, was one of the ten children of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar, a pediatrician at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, and Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar. His name and age appear on the list of Gaza’s war dead maintained by the territory’s health authorities and published by The Guardian, which records him as ten years old, killed in an Israeli airstrike.

On the afternoon of Friday, May 23, 2025, an Israeli strike destroyed the family home in the Qizan al-Najjar neighborhood, south of Khan Younis, minutes after his father had dropped his mother at the hospital for her shift and returned to the children. The house collapsed and caught fire; neighbors watched charred bodies being carried from the ruins. Nine of the children were killed — Rakan, his brothers Yahya, Raslan, Gebran, Sayden and Luqman, and his sisters Eve, Rival and Sidra — while his eleven-year-old brother Adam survived, critically wounded. Rakan’s body was among the seven recovered from the rubble that day, according to relatives quoted by Drop Site News; two of the children were initially missing beneath it.

The children’s mother received the bodies of her own children at the hospital where she worked; a fellow pediatrician there said the remains were placed in a single body bag. Their father, critically wounded in the strike, died of his wounds nine days later. The Israeli military said it had struck suspects operating near its troops and that the claim of harm to uninvolved civilians was under review.

Sources

• 9 of a doctor’s 10 children are killed in Israel’s latest strikes in Gaza — AP
• Israel’s latest strikes in Gaza kill 38 people including children — AP
• Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead — The Guardian
• The Massacre of Nine Children of the Al-Najjar Family — Drop Site News