He was 19-years-old, a software engineering student, and displaced from his home, trying to survive in central Gaza. He was a few days away from his 20th birthday.Shaban al-Dalou wouldn’t make it. He had struggled for months to get help for his family, recording videos describing his family’s plight and their life under Israel’s bombs. But he wasn’t able to get enough money to get his family out of Gaza.
The world finally paid attention to Shaban when his last moments were filmed this week. Connected to an IV drip, he was burned alive along with his mother after Israeli forces bombed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex in Deir el-Balah in the early hours of Monday.
In the videos Shaban recorded in the weeks and months before his death, he talks about the reality of living in Gaza, a premonition of the horror he faced at the end of his short life.
“There is no safe place here in Gaza,” Shaban says in one video, speaking into a phone camera from the makeshift tent where he had been living since fleeing his home.
In another video, Shaban talks about the difficulties of finding food “because the Israeli occupation managed to separate the middle area from the rest of Gaza and the people here are struggling to [meet] their basic needs”.
He also filmed himself donating blood at Al-Aqsa …