Gaza’s TikTok star, 19-year-old Mohammad ‘Medo’ Halimy, known for his videos of displaced people living in tents, was killed when a vehicle exploded, possibly hit by Israeli jets, near the internet café where he met with his aides in Khan Younis.
As he often did in films documenting the absurdities of daily life in the Strip, Halimy went to the local internet cafe, a tent with Wi-Fi where displaced Palestinians can connect to the outside world, on Monday to meet his friend and collaborator Talal Murad. They took a selfie that Halimy captioned “finally reunited” and began working. Suddenly there was a flash of light, Murad, 18, said, a blast of white heat and sprayed dirt. Murad felt pain in his neck.
Halimy was bleeding from the head. A car on the coastal road in front of them was engulfed in flames, probably from an Israeli air strike. It took 10 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. Hours later, doctors declared Medo dead, while the Israeli army said it was unaware of the attack that killed the boy.
“He was a message,” said Murad, still recovering from shrapnel wounds and distraught over his friend’s death, “he was a message of hope and strength.” Tributes for the young TikToker — who had a social media following of more than 250,000 people after he began posting videos chronicling his life as a displaced person in Rafah and Khan Younis — poured in from friends as far away as Harker Heights, Texas, where he spent a year in 2021 as part of a U.S. State Department initiative that sends students from around the world to American high schools.
“Medo was the life and soul of the gathering… humor, kindness, and wit, all the things you can never forget,” said Heba al-Saidi, alumni coordinator for the U.S. government-sponsored Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study program and a friend of Halimy’s. “He was destined for greatness, but he was taken away too soon.”
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