Countless images of dead and wounded children have been pouring out of the Gaza Strip for nearly a year, laying bare the toll of a war that’s killed tens of thousands of people.
This week, though, one photo stood out: It shows the body of a young girl covered in a white shroud, wearing pink roller skates. It’s been widely shared on social media, quickling becoming another defining image of the war in Gaza — a place UNICEF has called “a graveyard for children.”
Gaza’s Health Ministry says more than 40,000 people have been killed by Israeli fire in the war, a third of them children.
Ten-year-old Tala Abu Ajwa had managed to survive 332 days of the war, the bombardment, hunger and uncertainty. She and her family had fled on foot from one place to another eight times in the past 11 months, sometimes in the middle of the night.
“She’d say to me: Baba, why can’t we live like the other kids?”, her father, Hussam Abu Ajwa, tells NPR over the phone from Gaza City, the day after her death.
An attack hits a building without warning
It was nearly 5 p.m. on Tuesday when the young girl headed downstairs to catch up with her 12-year-old brother, Salah, to play outside. Just as Tala reached the ground floor, an explosion rocked the building.
Shrapnel sliced through the air, piercing her neck. An Israeli airstrike had struck an apartment in the building belonging to the Kiheel family, her father says.
“She was killed at the entrance of the building. I heard the airstrike and went down to look for her,” he says. It was a scene of carnage. She died within minutes.
The Israeli military says it takes precautions to limit civilian deaths in its hunt for Hamas, the group that launched the Oct. 7 attack that Israel says killed around 1,200 people.
The Israeli military did not respond to NPR’s request for comment on why this residential building in Gaza City was hit.
A defining image of the war’s toll on Gaza’s children
At the hospital, photos show Tala still wearing her pink roller skates as her body’s covered in a white shroud. A man gently takes the skates off, handing them to her father. A video shows him weeping in disbelief. Her mother is seen crumpled over Tala’s body.
“We’re all shocked. We never imagined it,” her father says. “My other kids are in shock. It feels like a nightmare,” he says. “Her mom, may God give her fortitude, is dazed.. She can’t believe what’s happened.”
Abu Ajwa says the airstrike wounded several children, still hospitalized, and killed eight other people, including a neighbor’s toddler son and the Kiheel family comprising the husband and wife, their three young children, and the kids' two grandparents.
The girl in pink skates who loved life
Abu Ajwa was a high school chemistry teacher before the war. His job meant he could afford the basics and some extras to lavish onto his eldest daughter, Tala.
“Those roller skates she was wearing, she’d really wanted me to buy them,” he says. “I got them for her, and it was the reason, praise be to God, for her death when she went down [the stairs to play].”
“She loved to play. She loved life,” he says.
Tala was the middle child and, for most of her life, the only girl in the family, wedged between two brothers, until her youngest sibling, a sister, was born about a year ago.
The father shares photos of the family’s life before the war with NPR. In one, Tala’s got her arms wrapped around her dad’s neck in a pool. In others, she’s dolled up in dresses, headbands, a Daisy Duck sweater, her school uniform. In another, she’s caked in foam and laughing.
“Whatever she wanted, I’d get it for her,” Abu Ajwa says.
A young girl’s last wishes and biggest fear
Abu Ajwa says he tried his best to keep the family safe, but the booms of Israeli airstrikes scared Tala at night. She’d run and curl up in his arms.
“She’d ask me ‘Why do we live like this with death and martyrs?’ And I’d tell her ‘when the war’s over, we’ll travel outside and God will reward you,’ ” he says.
The day before she died, Abu Ajwa says his daughter told him she dreamed of becoming a dentist and going back to school. The U.N. says most of Gaza’s schools have been destroyed or damaged in the war. Children haven’t been in school in nearly a year, with classrooms turned into crowded shelters for displaced families with nowhere else to go.
Tala also had one wish for September: She wanted to celebrate her younger brother’s 5th birthday with presents and friends to distract from the war. Abu Ajwa promised her he’d try.
“She was just a kid going down to innocently play with her roller skates and the other kids,” he says, choking back tears.
“They killed her with airstrikes weighing tons,” he says, as the sound of an Israeli drone buzzes overhead.
NPR’s Aya Batrawy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Ahmed Abuhamda contributed reporting from Cairo.
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