Israel kills Gaza TikToker known for his captivating 'tent life' diaries

It was another day of the Israeli genocide in besieged Gaza, another day of what 19-year-old Palestinian TikTok star Muhammed (Medo) Halimy called his "tent life."

As he often did in videos documenting life's mundane absurdities in the blockaded enclave, Halimy on Monday walked to his local internet cafe — rather, a tent with Wi-Fi where displaced Palestinians can connect to the outside world — to meet his friend and collaborator Talal Murad.

They snapped a selfie — "Finally Reunited" Halimy captioned it on Instagram — and started catching up. Then came a flash of light, 18-year-old Murad said, an explosion of white heat and sprayed earth. Murad felt pain in his neck. Halimy was bleeding from his head.

A car on the coastal road in front of them was engulfed in flames, the target of an Israeli air strike. It took 10 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. Hours later, doctors pronounced Halimy dead.

"He represented a message," Murad said on Friday, still recovering from his shrapnel wounds and reeling from the Israeli air strike that killed his friend. "He represented hope and strength."

As usual, the Israeli military feigned ignorance.

Tributes

Tributes to Halimy kept pouring on Friday from friends as far afield as Harker Heights, Texas, where he spent a year in 2021 as part of an exchange programme sponsored by the State Department.

"Medo was the life of the hangout ... humour and kindness and wit, all things that can never be forgotten," said Heba al-Saidi, alumni coordinator for the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study program.

"He was bound for greatness, but he was taken too soon."

His killing also catalysed an outpouring of grief on social media, where his followers expressed shock and sadness as if they, too, had lost a close friend.

"We worked together; it was a kind of resistance that I hope to continue," said Murad, who collaborated with Halimy on "The Gazan 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.

Halimy's journey

Halimy launched his own TikTok account after taking refuge with his parents, four brothers and sister in Muwasi, the southern coastal area that Israel has designated a humanitarian safe zone. They had fled Israel's invasion of Gaza City to the southern city of Khan Younis before escaping the bombardment again for the dusty encampment.

Halimy's content "came as a surprise," said his friend, 19-year-old Helmi Hirez. Turning his camera on the intimate details of his own life in Gaza, he reached viewers far and wide, revealing a maddening tedium that's largely left out of news coverage about the war.

"If you wonder what living in a tent is actually like, come with me to show you how I spend my day," Halimy says in his first of many "tent life" diaries filmed from the sprawling encampment.

He filmed himself going about his day: waiting restlessly in long lines for drinking water, showering with a jar and a bucket ("there's no shampoo or soap, of course"), scavenging ingredients to make a surprisingly tasty baba ganoush, the Middle East’s smoky eggplant dip ("Mama mia!" he marvels at his creation), and becoming very, very bored ("then I went back to the tent, and did nothing").

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world were captivated. His videos went viral — some amassing more than 2 million views on TikTok.

Even when recounting tragedies (his grandmother died, he mentioned at one point, largely because of Gaza's acute medication and equipment shortages ) or fretting over Israel's bombardment, Halimy's friends said that he found salve in channelling his grief and anxiety into deadpan humour.

"Very annoying," he says with an eye roll when the buzz of an Israeli drone interrupts one of his TikTok recipe videos.

"We proceeded to play, anyway," he says of his Monopoly game, when the whooshing of Israeli projectiles sounds in the skies above him and his friends. "Anyway, I lost."

In his last video, posted hours before he was killed, Halimy films himself scribbling in a notebook, its pages covered with mysterious black redaction bars.

"I started designs for my new secret project," he said from the tent cafe that would later be struck by Israel, in the same tone he always used, one part playful, one part serious.