When Israeli strikes killed 45 members of my family, Ziyad rushed to try to save them \u2013 this time, he was the victim. I write of him to defy the darkness<\/p>\n
My cousin Ziyad was too young to die. He was sleeping at home in Khan Younis refugee camp when the bombs fell just before midnight on Friday. After they heard the explosion, my cousins Mohammed and Moatsem ran to save him, they told me, but he had already died in his bed. He was 44.<\/p>\n
Ziyad was a social worker for Unrwa, working with vulnerable families in Gaza\u2019s refugee camps. Every summer when I visited Gaza from my home in Canada, he would buy my little son candies from Asa\u2019ad\u2019s shop \u2013 now gone with Asa\u2019ad (who was killed in October 2023) \u2013 insisting that Gaza\u2019s candies were the best in the world. Everyone in Khan Younis knew him for his calm presence, gentle spirit and warm smile. He was always ready to help \u2013 the words \u201cno\u201d or \u201cI can\u2019t\u201d were never part of his vocabulary. The night before he was killed, he visited the wounded and sick, including my uncle, Kamal.<\/p>\n
Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Israeli strikes killed 45 members of my family, Ziyad rushed to try to save them \u2013 this time, he was the victim. I write of him to defy the darkness My cousin Ziyad was too young to die. He was sleeping at home in Khan Younis refugee camp when the bombs fell just before … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}