Relatives of Palestinian student killed in tent camp blaze recall Israeli strike

Tragic story of Shaban al-Dalu, a young student, and his family caught in the crossfire of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Shaban al-Dalu was sleeping in his tent in a central Gaza hospital's courtyard, still recuperating from wounds from an Israeli strike on a mosque a week earlier, when a new strike hit, setting off an inferno.

The 19-year-old university student and his 38-year-old mother, Alaa al-Dalu, were among five people killed as the blaze ripped through a tent camp sheltering hundreds of Palestinian families in the courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah. Dozens of others, including children, were severely burned.

Al-Dalu and his mother were sleeping in the tent along with his father and three siblings when the strike hit at around 1:30 a.m. on Monday. Mohammed al-Dalu, his fifth sibling, was sleeping nearby at his vendor's table when the explosion jolted him awake. He found his father and uncle, who lived in a neighboring tent, struggling to pull their families out of the fire.

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The father, Ahmed al-Dalu, said he managed to rescue two of his sons and his daughter, but not his wife or eldest child, Shaban. “My son was being burned in front of me,” he said, speaking at the hospital with burns on his face. “I accepted the will of God in every sense of the word.”

The Israeli military said it targeted militants hiding out among the displaced, without providing evidence to support its claim. It was the seventh Israeli attack on this hospital compound since March; three of them occurred in September, according to Doctors without Borders, which supports the hospital.

The war began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 hostages. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which says women and children make up more than half the fatalities. It has displaced more than 1.9 million of Gaza's 2.3 million people, often multiple times.