Not just a number: This is the teenager who was burned alive in viral video
Israel’s war on Hamas or Gaza has shown the world the horrors of war in real time. Haunting images of the wounded, dying and dead have saturated social media, leaving no option to look away.
The death of Sh’aban Ahmed, a 19-year-old Palestinian whose excruciating death was filmed, with the video going viral might have made him to martyr.
Ahmed was incinerated alive while at the Al Aqsa Hospital in Gaza with a drip still attached to his arm after a bomb hit the healthcare facility along with some members of his family.
An X (formerly Twitter) user shared a clip Ahmed took while he was still alive spliced with the moments of his death.
“I am a student, studying software engineering...This barbaric starvation war...We have been displaced five times so far. Now we are at Al Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital in the middle of Gaza. I am taking of my family as I am the oldest,” Ahmed said.
He added that he had two sisters, two brothers and his parents. “We live under hard circumstances suffering from various things such as homelessness and limited food and extremely limited medicine.”
Ahmed panned the camera around to show that the family lived in a tent with only a few possessions.
The young man had dreamed of starting his life afresh in Egypt, where he would be relatively safe, but was robbed of this dream.
Warning: Graphic content which might not be suitable for sensitive viewers.
He was 19.
— AHMED | أحمد (@ASE) October 14, 2024
He was an engineering student.
He loved the guitar.
He was taking care of his family.
He built their tent in the hospital compound.
He burned to death after Israel bombed his tent while they were sleeping. pic.twitter.com/drT7y3CgDh
Tributes have poured in from all parts of the world as those who sympathise condemn the actions of the Israeli’s army and wish for the teenager’s death to not have been in vain.
“A year ago, Israel bombed a hospital, there was an international outcry so a bunch of media and political figures ran cover for them. now they’re just burning people alive in hospitals with zero pretext or effort to cover it up at all,” wrote another X user.
British media outlet, Sky News was later criticised when they used the inferno that enveloped Ahmed and his family in a headline that Iran had been responsible for the carnage on the image.
“This is Sh’aban, whose picture we all saw yesterday of him burning alive, IV in his arm as he lay in his hospital bed. He had memorised the entire Qur’an, and his mother Ala’a, who is also now dead, would proudly tell everyone about him. Palestinians are not numbers or corpses. They are entire worlds of people.” posted a user on the micro-blogging platform.“
IOL