It was another day of war in Gaza, another day of what 19-year-old Palestinian TikTok star Medo Halimi calls her “tent life.”
As he often did in the videos, on Monday Halimi went to his local internet café — rather, it was a Wi-Fi-equipped tent where displaced Palestinians could connect to the outside world — to meet his friend and colleague Talal Murad.
They took a selfie — “Finally reunited,” Halimi captioned it on Instagram — and got to talking.
Then there was a bright light, an explosion of white heat and splinters falling to the ground, Mr. Murad, 18, said. Mr. Murad felt pain in his neck. Halimi was bleeding from his head. In front of them on the coastal road, a car was engulfed in flames, apparently the target of an Israeli airstrike. An ambulance took 10 minutes to arrive. Hours later, doctors declared Halimi dead.
“He represented a message,” Mr. Murad said on Friday (August 30, 2024), still recovering from shrapnel wounds and from the Israeli airstrike that killed his friend. “He represented hope and strength.”
The Israeli military said it was not aware of the attack that killed Halimi.
Tributes poured in on Friday from friends as far away as Harker Heights, Texas, where he spent a year in 2021 as part of an exchange program sponsored by the State Department.
“Meadow was the life of this hangout … humor and kindness and wit, all things that will never be forgotten,” said Heba Al-Saidi, alumni coordinator of the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program. “He was bound for greatness, but he was taken too soon.”
His death also sparked an outpouring of grief on social media, where his followers expressed shock and sadness as if they too had lost a close friend.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians – according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants – and has led to a humanitarian disaster. It has also turned a large number of ordinary teenagers, who have little else to do but live each day, into war correspondents for the social media age.
“We worked together, it was a kind of resistance that I hope to continue,” said Mr. Murad, who collaborated with Halimi on “The Gaza Experience,” an Instagram account that answered questions from followers around the world trying to understand their lives in the besieged enclave, which is inaccessible to foreign journalists.
Halimi launched her own TikTok account after taking refuge with her parents, four brothers and sister in Muwasi, a southern coastal region that Israel has declared a humanitarian safe zone. They fled to the southern town of Khan Younis to escape Israel’s invasion of Gaza City, then moved to the dusty camp to escape bombing.
The war, which began with a surprise attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, left 1,200 people dead and about 250 hostages. The Israel-Hamas war has unleashed a flood of images that have now become familiar to audiences around the world: bombed-out buildings, mutilated bodies, chaotic hospital halls.
But Halimi’s material “came as a surprise,” said his friend, Helmi Hirez, 19.
Turning his camera on the intimate details of life in Gaza, he reached out to audiences far and wide, and exposed the maddening monotony that is largely left out of news coverage about the war.
“If you are wondering what it’s really like to live in a tent, come with me and I’ll show you how I spend my day,” Halimi says in the first of his many “tent life” diaries filmed from the sprawling camp.
He filmed himself going about his day: waiting uneasily in long lines for drinking water, bathing with a jar and a bucket (“There’s no shampoo or soap, of course”), eating surprisingly delicious baba ganoush, the Middle Eastern smoky eggplant sauce (“Mamma mia!” he marvels at his creation), and being very, very bored (“Then I went back to the tent, and did nothing”).
Millions of people around the world were mesmerized by his videos. His videos went viral – some garnering over 2 million views on TikTok.
Even when recounting tragedies (he once said his grandmother died mainly due to a lack of medicine and equipment in Gaza) or expressing concern over Israeli bombing, Halimi’s friends said he found relief in channeling his grief and anxiety into deadpan humor.
When the hum of an Israeli drone interrupts his TikTok recipe videos, he rolls his eyes and says, “So annoying.”
“As you can see, transport here is not five-star,” he says as he is crammed among men in a pickup truck heading to the nearby city of Deir al-Balah.
“We kept playing anyway,” he says of his Monopoly game, as the sound of Israeli projectiles whizzed across the sky above him and his friends. “Anyway, I lost.”
In her final video, posted just hours before her murder, Halimi filmed herself writing in a notebook whose pages were filled with mysterious black stripes.
“I’ve started making designs for my new secret project,” he told the Tent Café that came up later in the discussion, in the same tone he always used, one part playful, one part serious.