It was another day of war in Gaza, another day of what 19-year-old Palestinian TikTok star Medo Halimy called his “Tent Life.”
As he often did in videos documenting the everyday absurdities of life in the enclave, Halimy walked Monday to his local internet café — a Wi-Fi-equipped joint where displaced Palestinians can connect to the outside world — to meet his friend and collaborator Talal Murad . .
They took a selfie – “Finally reunited,” Halimy wrote on Instagram – and started catching up.
Then came a flash of light, said 18-year-old Mr. Murad, an explosion of white heat and sprayed earth. Mr. Murad felt pain in his neck. Halimy was bleeding from his head. A car on the coastal road ahead went up in flames, the apparent target of an Israeli airstrike. It took 10 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. Hours later, doctors pronounced Halimy dead.
“He represented a message,” Mr Murad said on Friday (Aug 30, 2024), still recovering from his shrapnel wounds and reeling from the Israeli airstrike that killed his friend. “He represented hope and strength.”
The Israeli military said it was not aware of the attack that killed Halimy.
Tributes to Halimy continued to pour in Friday from friends as far away as Harker Heights, Texas, where he spent a year in 2021 as part of an exchange program sponsored by the State Department.
“Medo was the life of the meeting place… humor, kindness and humor, all things that should never be forgotten,” said Heba al-Saidi, alumni coordinator for the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study program. “He was on his way to greatness, but he was taken too soon.”
His death also caused an outpouring of grief on social media, where his followers expressed their shock and sadness as if they too had lost a close friend.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians – according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which makes no distinction between civilians and militants – and has led to a humanitarian disaster. It has also transformed legions of ordinary teenagers, who have nothing to do but survive every day, into war correspondents for the age of social media.
“We worked together, it was a kind of resistance that I hope to continue,” said Mr. Murad, who collaborated with Halimy on “The Gazan Experience,” an Instagram account that answered questions from followers around the world who tried to to understand life. in the besieged enclave, which is inaccessible to foreign journalists.
Halimy launched his own TikTok account after taking refuge with his parents, four brothers and sister in Muwasi, the southern coastal area that Israel has designated as a humanitarian safe zone. They had fled the Israeli invasion of Gaza City to the southern town of Khan Younis before escaping the bombardment again and heading to the dusty encampment.
Sparked by Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on October 7, which killed 1,200 people and took some 250 hostage, the war between Israel and Hamas has produced a flood of images that now seem numbingly familiar to viewers around the world: bombed buildings, twisted bodies, chaotic hospital rooms.
But Halimy’s contents “came as a surprise,” said his friend, 19-year-old Helmi Hirez.
By focusing his camera on the intimate details of his own life in Gaza, he reached viewers around the world and revealed a maddening boredom that remains largely out of coverage of the war.
“If you’re wondering what life in a tent is actually like, come with me to show you how I spend my day,” says Halimy in his first of many diaries about ‘tent life’, filmed from the vast encampment.
He filmed himself going about his day: restlessly waiting in long lines for drinking water, showering with a pot and a bucket (“of course there is no shampoo or soap”), gathering ingredients to make a surprisingly tasty baba ganoush, the taste of the Middle East. smoky eggplant dip (“Mama mia!”, he marvels at his creation), and being very bored (“then I went back to the tent and did nothing”).
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world were fascinated. His videos went viral – some with more than 2 million views on TikTok.
Even as they recounted tragedies (his grandmother died, he said at one point, largely due to the acute shortage of medicine and equipment in Gaza) or worried about Israel’s bombardment, Halimy’s friends said he found bliss in channeling his sadness and fear into dry humor.
“Very annoying,” he says with an eye roll as the buzz of an Israeli drone interrupts one of his TikTok recipe videos.
“As you can see, the transportation here is not five star,” he says as he is crammed into a pickup truck among men on the way to the nearby city of Deir al-Balah.
“We continued playing anyway,” he says of his Monopoly game, as the whoosh of Israeli projectiles sounds in the air above him and his friends. “Anyway, I lost.”
In his final video, posted hours before he was killed, Halimy films himself scribbling in a notebook, its pages covered in mysterious black redaction bars.
“I’ve started designing my new secret project,” he said from the tented café that would be spoken later, in the same tone he always used: part playful, part serious.
