Grieving the Gaza granddad who wept for the ‘soul of his soul’
Khaled Nabhan with his youngest grandchild. Reem
Mohamed Solaimane writes in Al Jazeera on 17 December 2024:
Maysa Nabhan weeps silently in the living room, flipping through her phone for images of her father Khaled Nabhan with her children. “He was everything to us. He held this family together. When my children died, he was the one who comforted me every day,” she says, her voice breaking as she scrubs tears off her face with her hand.
Eight-year-old Ahmed sat beside his mother, bursting into tears whenever she wept, only calming down as she stopped or reached a black-clad arm to comfort him. “Grandpa’s gone,” he repeated tearfully, over and over.
In an overcrowded home where she has taken refuge with Ahmed, Maysa has little space to grieve her dad, who inadvertently became an icon of Gaza’s suffering a little more than a year ago.
‘Soul of my soul’
At 2am on November 29, 2023, in the shattered remains of Deir al-Balah, Khaled Nabhan cradled his granddaughter’s small, lifeless body. An Israeli air strike had killed three-year-old Reem and her five-year-old brother Tarek, the two youngest children of his eldest daughter, Maysa. Gently kissing Reem’s closed eyes, he whispered that she was “Ruh al-ruh” (soul of my soul) and the moment was caught on camera, making the 54-year-old grandfather an icon of Gaza’s agony.