Listen—I want to tell you about Saleh al-Jafarawi, and I want
you to understand something right from the start: this isn’t one of those
stories where the monster hides under the bed or lurks in the sewer system of
some backwater Maine town. No sir. This monster wore a uniform. Several
uniforms, in fact. And it killed a man who’d spent his whole life trying to
shine a light into the darkest corners of hell on earth.
Two days. That’s how long the ceasefire lasted before they
came for him. Two days of something that might’ve looked like peace if you
squinted hard enough, if you didn’t know any better, if you hadn’t lived
through what Saleh had lived through.
Sunday, October 12, 2025. Mark that date, friends and
neighbors, because that’s when they silenced him for good—not with algorithms
this time, not with account suspensions or red notices or any of that digital
witchcraft. No, this time they used bullets. Old school. Permanent.
The Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City. That’s where it
happened. Saleh was doing what he always did—pointing his camera at the truth,
that great and terrible thing that so many people spend their lives running
from. He’d lost contact with his colleagues that morning. Later they’d learn he’d
been kidnapped first. Because killing him wasn’t enough, you see. They had to
terrify him first. Had to make him know.
When they found his body, he was sprawled behind a truck bed
like a piece of discarded furniture, still wearing that vest. PRESS, it said.
The word might as well have been a target painted on his chest. The crowds
carried him to the hospital, and isn’t that always the way? The living carrying
the dead, hoping against hope that somehow the doctors can undo what hate has
done.
Al Jazeera said it was armed militias affiliated with
Israel. Gaza’s Ministry of Interior confirmed it. The smart money was on the
Doghmush clan—you know the type, the kind of crew that’s always existed in
every war zone since Cain took a rock to Abel. Local muscle working for
occupying forces, doing the dirty work that even soldiers don’t want their
names attached to.
Then there was Yasser Jihad Mansour Abu Shahab—now there’s a
name that could come straight out of one of my books, except I’d never have the
imagination to dream up something this evil. Gang leader. Militia commander. The
Washington Post fingered him as the architect behind the systematic looting
of aid convoys. Eighty trucks out of a hundred, stripped clean. Food and
medicine meant for people starving under a genocide, stolen like candy from a
baby. But connecting him directly to Saleh’s murder? That was considered too
dangerous. Even in death, some truths are too heavy to speak aloud.
---
Saleh was born in Gaza on November 22, 1997, and if you
think you had a rough childhood, friend, think again. This kid grew up with the
sound of bombs as his lullaby, gunfire as his morning alarm clock. But here’s
the thing about Saleh—and this is important, so pay attention—he didn’t let it
break him. Not completely. Not in the way that mattered.
The boy could play tennis. Table tennis, to be specific, and
he was good. First place at the University Table Tennis Championship in
2022. Represented Palestine at the World University Tennis Championship in
Qatar, February 4, 2023. Picture that for a minute: a kid from a war zone,
swinging a paddle, representing his country at an international competition. It’s
the kind of detail that makes a character real, makes you understand that
before he was a symbol or a hashtag or a cautionary tale, he was just a person
trying to live his life.
But Gaza had other plans for Saleh al-Jafarawi.
He studied journalism at the Islamic University of Gaza,
earned his bachelor’s degree in 2019. Then he hit the streets with a modest
camera—the kind of setup that wouldn’t impress the network news boys with their
satellite trucks and their hair gel, but it was enough. It was always enough
for the truth.
Through those narrow alleys—and if you’ve never walked
through a war zone, let me tell you, alleys take on a whole different character
when you know a sniper could be drawing a bead on you from any window—Saleh
documented everything. Mothers weeping over ruins that used to be homes.
Children staring at rubble with those thousand-yard stares that should only
belong to combat veterans, not kids who should be worrying about homework and
video games. And somehow, impossibly, hope still flickering in the devastation
like a candle that refuses to go out no matter how hard the wind blows.
He wore that PRESS vest like armor, like a talisman, like it
meant something. And maybe it did, once upon a time, back when the world still
pretended to care about rules.
---
During the March of Return in 2018—a demonstration organized
by the Association for the Defense of Refugee Rights in Israel, bringing
refugees back to Atlit village south of Haifa—Saleh was right there on the
front lines. Got injured more than once. Kept coming back. That’s the thing
about truth-tellers: they’re like those inflatable punching bags with sand in
the bottom. You knock them down, they pop right back up. Until you knock them
down for good.
He built a following on Instagram—@saleh_aljafarawi was his
handle, back when he still had one. People loved him because he showed them
what the sanitized news wouldn’t. He broadcast live from bombed hospitals,
refugee camps, active conflict zones. His view counts went through the roof.
And that’s when Meta decided he was a problem.
They suspended his account. Not once. Not twice. Again and
again, over two years, like some kind of digital whack-a-mole game. Violation
of community standards, they said. Dangerous organizations and individuals.
Protest-oriented content. All those corporate euphemisms that really mean: You’re
making people uncomfortable. You’re showing them things they’d rather not see.
You’re bad for business.
His main account got permanently deleted. Poof. Gone.
All that documentation, all that testimony, erased like chalk in the rain. He’d
create a new account. They’d delete it. He’d create another. They’d delete that
one too. It was a preview of coming attractions, wasn’t it? First they killed
him digitally. Then they did it for real.
“Unfortunately, the account deletions are permanent, and
none of them will ever come back,” he wrote on his Instagram story on March 9,
2025. You can hear the exhaustion in those words, can’t you? The weariness of a
man fighting a battle on too many fronts.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese called it what it
was: killing a journalist twice. First his voice, then his body. She wrote
about the 250 journalists killed in Gaza, talked about genocide museums and
reparations that would come someday, maybe, if anyone still cared by then. If
anyone was left to care.
Instagram slapped Saleh’s account with what they called a “Red
Notice”—marking him as a target, just like they did with Al Jazeera
correspondent Anas al-Sharif. Every time he posted about Israel, his followers
would see a warning. His content got suppressed, shadow-banned, disappeared
down the memory hole. Even the people who wanted to see his work couldn’t find
it.
---
The Israeli propaganda machine mocked him, of course. They
called him Hamas news anchor, sick father, singer, journalist—like a man couldn’t
be all those things at once, like being multidimensional was somehow proof of
deception. “The devil works hard, but Gaza’s film industry works harder,” they
sneered.
Pro-Israel accounts on X accused him of staging “Pallywood”
scenes—Palestine plus Hollywood, get it? They said he was faking footage,
pretending to be injured. One user, @HananyaNaftali, posted two clips side by
side, labeled “yesterday” and “today,” claiming it proved Saleh was playing
pretend.
Except Reuters fact-checked it and found the truth—because
the truth has a way of surviving, doesn’t it, even when everyone’s trying to
bury it? The two videos showed different people. The “yesterday” clip was Saeed
Zandek, a sixteen-year-old boy who lost his legs during Israel’s siege of Nur
Shams refugee camp on July 24. The “today” clip was Saleh.
Saleh responded the way he always did: with the truth.
“I am Saleh al-Jafarawi, a freelance journalist,” he wrote in
a post that Al Jazeera later covered. “Journalists should be protected
internationally. I take full responsibility for my own safety before the
international community. I will not stop exposing crimes against the
Palestinian people.”
That post sparked a viral campaign. #صالح_الجعفراوي
flooded Instagram with solidarity messages. People calling for his protection,
for the protection of journalists like him. But social media solidarity is like
thoughts and prayers after a school shooting—it makes people feel better
without actually stopping the bullets.
Saleh refused evacuation offers. Said he’d never leave Gaza.
This was his home, and he was going to bear witness or die trying.
“Honestly, I live in fear every second,” he told Al
Jazeera, and there’s a confession that’ll haunt you if you let it. “Especially
after hearing what the Israeli occupation said about me. I’m living a second
life every second, never knowing what comes next.”
He knew. Deep down, he must have known.
---
Here’s something that’ll surprise you: Saleh wasn’t just
about journalism and activism. The man donated his earnings to charity. Helped
war victims. Played a key role in funding the renovation and relocation of
children’s hospitals in Gaza. His social media fundraisers raised over $10
million for humanitarian causes—a fact confirmed, with what I imagine was
considerable irritation, by Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee.
During Eid al-Adha 2025, Saleh was one of Gaza’s largest
animal sacrifice donors. Even under siege, even with death threats hanging over
his head like a sword on a fraying thread, he was thinking about his community.
TRT World made a documentary about him. There’s a moment in
it where he’s with Gaza’s children and fighters, and he says: “All the scenes
and moments I’ve lived through over these 467 days will never fade from my
memory. Everything we’ve faced—we will never forget.”
Four hundred and sixty-seven days. Count them. That’s how
long he’d been documenting the latest chapter of Gaza’s nightmare.
TRT World also aired his final video. In it, Saleh is
celebrating the ceasefire agreement. He looks happy—or as happy as someone can
look when they’ve seen what he’s seen, lived what he’s lived. The video was
recorded just hours before they killed him.
Hours.
That’s the punch line to this cosmic joke, friends and
neighbors. He survived 467 days of genocide, bombs, shootings, starvation,
disease, and digital assassination. He survived long enough to see a ceasefire,
to feel that tiny flutter of hope that maybe, just maybe, things might get
better.
And then they shot him in the street like a dog.
---
So here’s what I want you to take away from this: Saleh al-Jafarawi was twenty-seven years old when they murdered him. He was a
journalist, an athlete, a humanitarian, and a stubborn son of a bitch who
refused to be silenced. They tried to erase him from the internet before they
erased him from the earth. They mocked him, threatened him, hunted him.
And in the end, they got him.
But here’s the thing about truth-tellers—and this is
something I’ve learned from writing about monsters for forty-some-odd years:
you can kill the messenger, but you can’t kill the message. Not really. Not
forever. The truth has a way of leaking out, like blood from under a door, like
a bad smell you can’t quite locate, like a ghost that won’t stay buried.
Saleh’s story is out there now. You’re reading it. I’m
telling it. And we’ll keep telling it, because that’s what you do for the dead
who died trying to bear witness.
We become witnesses to the witnesses.
We remember.
And we make damn sure the world remembers too, whether it
wants to or not.
Constant reader, I hope this one keeps you up at night.
Because it should. Because some monsters don’t live in sewers or sleep in
coffins or howl at the moon.
Some monsters write press releases and delete Instagram
accounts and shoot journalists in the street.
And those are the monsters we should fear most of all.
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