Gaza: Khaled Nabhan, whose tribute to his granddaughter went viral, was killed by Israeli fire

Khaled Nabhan loved kissing his little girl on the cheeks and nose. It made her laugh. Until the day the three-year-old girl remained inert in his embrace. The video of this Palestinian grandfather, filmed as he said goodbye to his beloved granddaughter, whom he called “the soul of (son) soul”, had been massively shared on social networks.

In November 2023, her grandchildren, 5-year-old Reem and Tarek, were killed by an Israeli airstrike while they were sleeping in their bed. Their home, in the Al Nuseirat refugee camp in southern Gaza, was destroyed. A few hours before, the children had begged their grandfather to allow them to play outside. He had refused. The bombs were raining that day.

But this precaution was not enough. “They were buried under the debris,” the grandfather confided in tears to the American channel CNN. Reem Nabhan, the “little girl in the yellow dress”, then became one of the faces of the massacre in the Gaza Strip.

A year later, Khaled Nabhan died. He was killed by an Israeli tank shell on Monday, his family and Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat, central Gaza, said. Saed Nabhan, Khaled’s nephew, told CNN on Monday that tanks had shelled their neighborhood. As he ran to Al-Awda Hospital, he was shocked to find his uncle among the victims. “What a great man we have lost. We will never have someone like him again,” he lamented.

Khaled Nabhan shared videos describing daily life in Gaza. Since the start of the Israeli offensive in the enclave, he has dedicated his days to entertaining and helping children, distributing winter items and toys to traumatized children.

A strong bond

As the girl’s father worked abroad, the family lived with the maternal grandfather. The latter spent a lot of time with Reem. We saw them, in a video, perched on a bike, the little girl dressed in a yellow dress, all smiles and wearing pretty pigtails. Other images illustrate the obvious complicity between Khaled and Reem, playing at holding each other by a lock of hair and a piece of beard. Since their death, the grandfather wore around his neck a football medal belonging to Tarek and an earring from Reem as a brooch.

More than 45,059 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli military campaign of retaliation on the Gaza Strip, the majority civilians, according to data from the Hamas Ministry of Health, deemed reliable by the UN.