Grieving the Gaza granddad who wept for the ‘soul of his soul’
Al Jazeera
Khaled Nabhan grieved peacefully for his granddaughter Reem last year. On Monday, Israel killed him in Gaza, too.
Deir el-Balah, Gaza – 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.
