Two years ago, on July ۳۱, ۲۰۲۴, I was spending the evening with my two sisters in Gaza City’s Remal neighbourhood, shopping for new clothes. For the first time in months, I felt hopeful, speaking with confidence about the day the war would end and we would return to our home in Jabalia to rebuild it. As I reached for an item of clothing, the shopkeeper suddenly interrupted us. Looking at his phone with tears in his eyes, he said, “Ismail al-Ghoul has been targeted by Israeli aircraft.”
I froze and asked, “Are you sure?”
His voice trembled as he replied, “Yes, … they’ve killed him.”
I walked out of the shop in tears, repeating the same question to myself: Why? What had he done to deserve this?
I wasn’t grieving Ismail simply because he was a journalist reporting Gaza’s story to the world. I was grieving because I had known him personally. To me, he was a man who loved life and dreamed of the day he would finally be reunited with his wife and young daughter, Zina, after the war had separated them.
I first met Ismail while my family and I were sheltering at al-Shifa Hospital after being displaced. My father knew him and took me to see him, hoping Ismail might be able to help me charge my phone. It had been dead for more than three weeks because there was no electricity.
When we found him, he was standing in front of the camera, wearing his press vest and helmet and holding Al Jazeera’s microphone as he reported on what was happening in Gaza. After he finished the broadcast, my father introduced me to him.
We spoke for only a few minutes. When he learned that I spoke English fluently, he said, “Invest in your English. Use it to carry our voice to the world.”
At the time, his advice seemed impossible to follow. There was no electricity, no internet and no opportunity to write or work in journalism. Yet his words stayed with me.
Over the months that followed, Ismail became a close friend of our family, not simply the journalist who had encouraged me to write. As we came to know him, we saw how deeply he missed his wife and daughter. Much of what he spoke about was his little girl, Zina, and his dream that the war would end soon so that he could return to his family.
My father always called him “Abu Zina”, an affectionate Arabic form of address meaning “Zina’s father”, and prayed that Allah would reunite him with his wife and daughter, who had been displaced to southern Gaza. Whenever Ismail heard that prayer, he smiled and embraced my father.
One day, he happily told my father that he had finally managed to speak to his wife and see Zina.
Ismail was also a close friend of my older brother, Oday, and the two often spent time together. After my father was injured during our displacement at al-Shifa, Ismail came to visit him and see how he was doing. He promised that, once my father recovered, he would prepare a meal of fish for him, Oday and their friends.
We were all surprised. At the time, fish was almost impossible to find because reaching the sea was so dangerous, and what little was available was extraordinarily expensive. When my father tried to persuade him not to go to such trouble, Ismail smiled and said, “You’re my dear friend, Abu Oday.”
Ismail was rarely seen without a small thermos filled with hot coffee. One day, Oday came home and said, “Today I drank coffee with Ismail.”
I looked at him in surprise because he did not even like coffee.
“Ismail handed me a cup and said, ‘If you love me, drink it,’” he explained. “So I did.”
In June ۲۰۲۴, my family and I were displaced again, this time to the home of one of my father’s friends in the Remal neighbourhood. For the first time in months, I could charge my phone and access the internet. That was when I remembered Ismail’s advice. I began searching for media outlets that might allow me to write in English, hoping to tell Gaza’s stories to the world, just as he had encouraged me to do.
The following month, only hours before he was killed, Ismail had been sitting with my brother in our family’s car near al-Shifa Hospital. He was drinking coffee from his familiar thermos and wearing a light beige cap to shield himself from the summer sun.
When he left for what would become his final reporting assignment, he forgot both the cap and the thermos in our car.
After his death, my father kept them both. He often wore the cap, saying, “This is the last thing Ismail left behind.” He carried them with him through every displacement until we eventually settled in our damaged home we had hoped to rebuild in northern Gaza.
But even those reminders of him did not survive the war.
In mid-May ۲۰۲۵, we received a phone call from the Israeli military ordering us to evacuate our home immediately because it would be bombed within minutes. We fled with nothing, leaving behind our clothes, food and personal belongings, including Ismail’s cap and coffee thermos.
The house was destroyed, and with it, the last physical reminders we had of him.
Israel did not kill only a journalist that day. It killed a father who longed to embrace his daughter, a husband waiting for the war to end so he could return to his family and a friend whose kindness touched everyone who knew him.
Two years later, the words Ismail spoke to me at al-Shifa Hospital still guide me. After his death, I made him a promise: I would keep telling Gaza’s story to the world. Every story I write is an attempt to keep that promise.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
