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It’s another day of war in Gaza, another day that 19-year-old Palestinian TikTok star Medo Halimy calls “Tent Life.”
As he often does in videos documenting the common absurdity of life in the enclave, Halimy on Monday walked into a local internet cafe – rather, a tent with Wi-Fi where displaced Palestinians can connect to the outside world – to meet his friend and collaborator Talal Murad. .
He took a selfie – “Finally Reunited” Halimy captioned it on Instagram – and began to catch up.
Then came a flash, 18-year-old Murad said, a blast of white heat and the earth was sprayed. Murad felt a pain in his neck. Halimy was bleeding from his head. A car on the coastal road in front of them was on fire, apparently the target of an Israeli airstrike. It took 10 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. A few hours later doctors pronounced Halimy dead.
“He represents a message,” Murad said on Friday, still recovering from shrapnel wounds and reeling from the Israeli airstrike that killed his friend. “They represent hope and strength.”
The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on the attack.
Tributes for Halimy continued to pour in Friday from friends as far away as Harker Heights, Texas, where he is spending a year in 2021 as part of a US State Department initiative that sends students from around the world to American high schools.
“Medo is a hangout life … humor and kindness and intelligence, all the unforgettable things,” said Heba al-Saidi, alumni coordinator for the US government-sponsored Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study program and Halimy’s friend. “He’s going to be big, but he’s very fast.”
Her feed was also flooded with hundreds of thousands of posts from her TikTok followers, expressing their grief as if they too had lost a close friend.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza – triggered by an October 7 Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and left around 250 hostages – has produced images unfamiliar to viewers around the world: Bombed buildings, burning bodies, hospital wards chaotic.
The war has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians – according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not list the number of dead as militants – and has caused a humanitarian disaster. It has also turned legions of ordinary teenagers, who have nothing to do every day but survive, into war journalists for the age of social media.
“We work together, this is the resistance I want,” said Murad, who collaborates with Halimy on “Gaza Experience,” an Instagram account where the friends answer questions from followers around the world trying to understand their lives. in a besieged enclave, which is inaccessible to foreign journalists.
Halimy launched her own TikTok account after fleeing with her parents, four brothers and a sister in Muwasi, a southern coastal region designated by Israel as a humanitarian safe zone. His friends said he had fled the Israeli invasion of Gaza City to Khan Younis before fleeing another bomb earlier this year.
The contents “were shocking,” said his friend, 19-year-old Helmi Hirez.
Turning the camera to detail his own daily life in the enclave, he reached viewers far and wide, showing the maddening tedium of war generally left out of breaking news coverage.
“If you want to know what living in a tent is really like, come with me to show how I spend my days,” He told the camera during the first many “tent life” diaries filmed from the sprawling encampment.
He made a film about his day: waiting restlessly in long lines to drink water, showering with a jar and a bucket (“no shampoo or soap, of course),” scavenging ingredients to make the amazing baba ganoush, in the Middle East. Smoky eggplant dip (“Mama mia!” he marveled at his creation), and became very bored (“then I went back to the tent, and did nothing”).
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world were attracted to it. During the last few months of fighting, Halimy’s videos went viral – some have collected more than 2 million views on TikTok.
Even when recounting tragedies (his grandfather died, he mentions at one point, due to acute medication and lack of equipment in Gaza) or worries about Israel’s pulverizing bombardment, Halimy’s friends say they find a salve to channel their sadness and anxiety into humor the dead.
“It’s so annoying,” he says with a wink as the buzz of an Israeli drone interrupts one of his TikTok recipe videos before returning to cooking.
Jumping into the back of a crowded pickup truck on its way to the central city of Deir al-Balah, he paused and said, “As you can see, transportation here is not five-star.”
And when the sound of projectiles streaking through the sky over Gaza surprised him, apparently alarmingly close, he turned the camera back to the Monopoly game. “We keep playing,” he said, then frowned. “Anyway, I lost.”
In the last video, posted just hours before he was killed, he recorded himself writing in a notebook – pages covered with black redaction bars – in the same internet cafe where the airstrikes later took place.
“I’m starting to plan for a new secret project,” he said in an even tone, one playful, one serious.
___ Isabel DeBre reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
