Youssef Salem arrives at the meeting with his computer. At the start of the weekend, he chose a restaurant, not far from his home, located in a modest residential area in the west of Istanbul. “I like this café, because you can smoke a hookah there”slips this 34-year-old Palestinian. Since the start of the war, he has recorded, day after day, in an Excel table, the names of members of his family, close or extended, who died in Gaza, the dates and circumstances of their disappearance. To date, its table includes 270 names, spread over four generations. The oldest was 90 years old, the youngest a few months. “They are my uncles, my cousins, my aunts, their children and grandchildrenexplains Youssef Salem, in a surprisingly calm and detached tone. In Gaza, we are all very close. We grow together. We marry each other and we support each other. »
Before the war, the Salem clan consisted of 700 to 800 people. “A third of our extended family has been wiped out”says this man whose hair, despite his young age, is already graying. With his wife, Nejah, and their daughter, Ayloul, he lives in Istanbul, where he works in an NGO. The little family left Gaza in 2021. That year, in May, Israel waged an eleven-day war against the enclave, killing more than 250 Palestinians. This is the first major conflict that the young couple has experienced since the birth of their daughter in 2019. “We told ourselves that it was not possible to raise our child in the middle of successive wars. But the one in progress today has nothing to do with those we have known”observes Youssef, a law graduate from Al-Azhar University in Gaza.
In August, the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor recorded more than 2,750 families having lost at least three members due to Israeli attacks over the previous eleven months. Still according to this source, more than 365 Gazan families have more than ten members killed in the ongoing war. “These are not isolated incidents: many families saw several generations wiped out in a single strikeexplains Ramy Abdu, president of Euro-Med. It’s as if entire families disappeared overnight. » In total, nearly 42,000 people have been killed over the past twelve months in the Palestinian enclave, according to Hamas health authorities, a figure validated by international organizations.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers One year after October 7, the Gaza Strip, a land that has become unlivable
Add to your selections
Youssef’s life changed on the night of December 12, 2023. That day, in the neighborhood of Sheikh Redwan, in Gaza City, six buildings housing 130 people, on Al-Salem Street, named after the clan , are pulverized by a salvo of Israeli missiles. The next day, at dawn, Youssef Salem discovered around forty missed calls from the coastal strip on his phone. He eventually learned of the deaths of 102 members of his family. One of his cousins, Mohamed Farid Salem, filmed the six destroyed buildings. Youssef keeps this video carefully on his computer, as well as other images and documents relating to the deaths of his loved ones.
You have 84.16% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
