Middle East: The world first met Hind Rajab through a crackling phone line, a terrified six-year-old trapped in a bullet-riddled car, whispering for help. Two years later, Gaza still speaks in Hind’s voice, the trembling of a child who saw what no child in the world should see.

Across Gaza’s devastated neighbourhoods, the names of doctors, poets, journalists, students, parents, and infants that once flashed across screens have turned into stories etched into the city’s ruins.

Two years after Israel launched its no-holds-barred genocidal war against Palestinians in the coastal territory, the faces that defined that horror, those killed and those who are still enduring death and destruction after 24 months, tell the story of a people who refuse to submit.

Over the past two years, Gaza has witnessed death and destruction in its worst form. According to the Government Media Office, Israel has dropped more than 200,000 tons of explosives on the territory in just 730 days — roughly 13 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb.

Hospitals, schools, homes, farmland, mosques, and cemeteries have been obliterated, leaving a population reeling from loss and trauma.

The human toll has been staggering. Since October 7, 2023, over 76,000 Palestinians have been killed or gone missing, including more than 20,000 children and 12,500 women.

Entire families have been wiped out: at least 2,700 families have been erased from civil registries, with all members killed.

Gaza’s health sector has been devastated. 38 hospitals and 96 health centers have been bombed, 197 ambulances destroyed, and over 1,600 medical staff killed, with 362 arrested.

The education system has faced similar destruction: 95 percent of schools damaged, 668 bombed, and 165 completely destroyed, leaving at least 13,500 students and 830 teachers dead.

Starvation has been used as a weapon. At least 120,000 aid trucks have been blocked, 47 food kitchens and 61 distribution centers attacked, leaving 650,000 children at risk of death from hunger.

Meanwhile, infrastructure has been levelled. At least 268,000 homes have been destroyed, 2 million people displaced, 94 percent of farmland ruined, and fisheries obliterated.

The humanitarian crisis continues to deepen, despite the talk of a ceasefire, as the regime continues its bombing campaign, leaving millions of lives on the edge.

We profile some of the Gazans who dominated headlines in the past two years. Many of them were brutally murdered, yet their courage, resilience, and voices managed to awaken the conscience of the world.

Hind Rajab: Child who shook the world

The call lasted over three hours. Hind, trapped in her family’s car under Israeli fire, was talking to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) team.

Her family lay motionless beside her. “Please come take me,” she whispered to the PRCS dispatcher. “It’s getting dark and I am afraid of the dark.”

Hind’s voice, recorded and circulated worldwide, became one of the most haunting records of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The PRCS rescue team sent to reach her was itself targeted by Israel and killed before arrival.

Her story would later be immortalised in The Voice of Hind Rajab, a docudrama that won the Silver Lion award and received a record 23-minute standing ovation at its premiere.

In May 2024, pro-Palestine student protestors at Columbia University renamed Hamilton Hall to “Hind’s Hall”, carrying her name into the global protest movement against genocide.

A human rights body was also named after her – Hind Rajab Foundation – which documents Israeli war crimes in Gaza and exposes the war criminals behind those crimes.

Refaat Al-Araeer: Gaza’s beloved poet

Refaat Al-Araeer was killed when a missile struck his sister’s home in Al-Shujaiya on December 7, 2023. He was Gaza’s most prominent writer and professor of world literature.

He had taught creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, his classes a refuge for students who wrote under the brutal Israeli siege.

Before his death, he posted a short poem titled If I Must Die, ending with the line: “Let it be a tale.” The poem became Gaza’s anthem of endurance, recited at protests across the world.

Just two days before his death, Al Araeer wrote a tribute to the Palestinian resistance.

"More horrific Israeli bombardments…We could die this dawn. I wish I were a freedom fighter so I die fighting back those invading Israeli genocidal maniacs invading my neighbourhood and my city."

In one of his last public interviews, the Palestinian poet vowed that, if necessary, he would die by the same pen through which he lived.

“I am an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade and barge at us, charge at us, open door-to-door to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at Israeli soldiers even if that is the last thing that I would be able to do.”

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: Doctor imprisoned by Israel

By late 2024, Kamal Adwan Hospital was one of the last functioning medical centres in northern Gaza. Its director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a paediatrician, had refused every evacuation offer since October 7, 2023.

On October 25, Israeli roops stormed the hospital, killing his son and detaining all remaining staff.

Weeks later, Abu Safiya was arrested and he has been held without trial since. An image of the Palestinian doctor in white robes walking through the ruins outside his hospital became viral.

A campaign for his release has been running with many human rights activists and medical associations in Gaza and across the world demanding his release.

His lawyer, Ghaid Qasem, says he suffers fractured ribs, heart pain, and severe skin infections, all untreated. “He is being abandoned to disease and hunger,” she stated.

For months, Abu Safiya had stayed to keep the hospital functioning. His arrest and torture expose Israel’s war on life itself.

Wael Dahdouh: Gaza’s journalist of conscience

When Israel’s airstrike killed Wael Dahdouh’s wife, daughter, son, and grandson in the Nuseirat refugee camp, the journalist learned of their deaths live on air.

The next day, he went back to work, documenting the genocide against other Palestinians.

For over a year, Dahdouh continued reporting under relentless bombardment, despite shrapnel wounds and profound personal loss. His endurance made him the moral centre of war coverage and as Gaza’s living record.

In 2025, the National Press Club awarded him its top honour for press freedom, calling him “the face of journalism under siege.”

Dahdouh is seen as a bearer of Gaza’s grief and a symbol of its people’s character.

Anas Al-Sharif: Gaza’s voice on the frontline

On August 11, 2025, Israeli regime forces bombed a clearly marked media tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital, killing journalist Anas Al-Sharif, 28, and four of his colleagues.

The tent was marked as a press area, and journalists were identifiable by their equipment and vests when the bombing took place.

The strike occurred at night, with the Israeli occupation forces admitting to killing the young journalist and his fellow reporters, falsely accusing him of being a “Hamas operative.”

Al-Sharif had reported relentlessly from northern Gaza since the first days of the war, documenting mass displacement and starvation.

His last transmission, filmed hours before the deadly Israeli strike, showed the hospital courtyard filled with wounded civilians.

Dr Sufyan Tayeh: Scientist from Gaza

A December 2023 airstrike by Israel on Jabalia in northern Gaza killed Dr Sufyan Tayeh, one of the world’s leading physicists and the president of the Islamic University of Gaza.

A member of the top two per cent of global researchers, Tayeh was the UNESCO Chair for Physics and Space Sciences in Palestine. He was also the recipient of the Abdul Hameed Shoman Award for Young Arab Scientists.

His death, alongside his family, was widely mourned across the academic world, an irreplaceable blow to the Palestinian scientific community.

The Israeli strike that ended his life symbolised the regime’s aim of erasing the Palestinian intellect.

Dr Marwan Al-Sultan: Gaza’s cardiologist

In July 2025, an Israeli missile struck the exact room where Dr Marwan Al-Sultan, a senior cardiologist and director of the Indonesian Hospital, was working.

“A missile was dropped on his room exactly, on him precisely,” his daughter Lobna said later. “All the other rooms were fine, except for his; the missile hit it precisely.”

“Until the last minute of his life, he did not leave his job. He paid for this dedication with his life,” Al-Sultan’s son Ahmed said about his father.

He was also one of only two remaining heart specialists in the territory, according to Healthcare Worker Watch (HWW), a Palestinian medical organisation. 

Human rights groups called his death a systematic campaign against Gaza’s medical infrastructure and those who try to keep it alive.

Reem and Tareq: Essence of the Soul

Three-year-old Reem and five-year-old Tareq were among those killed when Israeli strikes levelled their home in Al-Nuseirat in November 2023.

Their grandfather, Khaled Nabhan, became a reluctant face of Gaza’s grief. In a viral video, he was seen kissing Reem’s lifeless body, holding her earring pinned to his chest. “She was my ruh-el-ruh,” he said — the essence of my soul.

The haunting image joined a growing archive of unbearable civilian testimony, family photos turned into evidence.

Nabhan, famously called Gaza’s “beloved grandfather,” too, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2024.

Suleiman Al-Obeid: Palestinian Pele

In August 2025, an Israeli strike on a food distribution site in southern Gaza killed Suleiman Al-Obeid, a former national footballer and captain of Khadamat al-Shati Club.

He had been waiting to collect humanitarian aid for his family when the bombing happened.

He earned the nickname “the Pele of Palestinian football” after the Brazilian icon celebrated as one of the game’s all-time greats.

At the international level, al-Obeid played 24 matches with Al-Fida’i, scoring two goals, the most notable being a scissor kick against the Yemeni national football team during the 2010 West Asian Football Federation Championship.

The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) said in August that 421 football players were among the 808 athletes killed in Gaza by Israel, nearly half of them children.

Awni Eldous: Gaza’s young gamer  

When 13-year-old Awni Eldous uploaded his last gaming video in 2023, he thanked viewers for helping him reach 1,000 subscribers. His dream was to reach 100,000.

An Israeli strike killed him and his family weeks later. Posthumously, his channel now has more than 1.3 million subscribers.

His relatives called him “Engineer Awni” for his fascination with computers.

His ten videos now stand as a haunting record of Gaza’s lost generation, children whose ambitions were cut short by war.

Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah: Witness to barbarism

British-Palestinian plastic surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah arrived in Gaza on October 9, 2023, two days after Israel launched its genocidal assault on the territory.

From the operating tables of Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli hospitals, he became one of Gaza’s most direct witnesses to the war’s human toll, performing dozens of surgeries daily, many on children.

By the fourth day, half his patients were minors, he recalled later.

“By day four or five [of Israel’s military campaign], half of my operating list, which was around ten to twelve cases every day, were children,” he said.

He documented injuries consistent with white phosphorus and other banned munitions, recording the details that would later feed international investigations.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the end goal is to ethnically cleanse Gaza,” the plastic surgeon stated.

His eyewitness accounts now serve as key evidence in ongoing inquiries into Israel’s genocide, making him one of the few living chroniclers of the most documented genocide of the century.

Two years on: Gaza’s testimony and world’s response

Two years on, Gaza’s calendar remains frozen. Names, Hind, Refaat, Hussam, Wael, Reem, Suleiman, Awni, and the thousands who never had time to be named echo across the world.

Some were buried with notebooks, cameras, and stethoscopes. Others survived to document what remains of a land under the brutal siege. Together, they form the living archive of a genocide the world watched in real time.

However, the walls of impunity are beginning to crack. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has formally acknowledged the plausibility of genocide, ordering Israel to halt its actions leading to mass starvation.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) continues to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former war minister, Yoav Gallant, while universities, unions, and cities worldwide mark the second anniversary with boycotts, encampments, and cultural actions.

Around the globe, protestors carry banners bearing the names of Gaza’s dead, a roll call of conscience stretching across continents.

Israel’s siege still chokes the Strip. Aid convoys remain blocked. But Gaza has achieved a global recognition of its people’s humanity and endurance.

Two years on, as the genocide continues, so does the documentation. And in every archive, news story, film, report, courtroom — the faces of Gaza return.

Source: Press TV

 

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