A Palestinian gardener who gained 250,000 TikTok followers by tending to small plants in a refugee camp has been killed in a suspected Israeli airstrike.
STATEMENT FROM HIS FRIEND
Medo Halimy, 19, was hit by shrapnel from a blast in Khan Younis, southern Gaza on Monday while meeting with a friend and fellow collaborator Talal Murad.
Murad, 18, said there was a flash of flight, followed by an explosion of white heat and sprayed earth. He felt pain in his neck and saw Halimy was bleeding from his head.
It took 10 minutes for an ambulance to arrive to the scene, according to the teen. Halimy was rushed to the intensive care unit in Nasser hospital, but pronounced dead by doctors several hours later.
The pair were in an area near the beach where displaced people have been sheltering when Halimy was struck, the Tamer Institute for Community Education told the BBC.
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HOW HALIMY BECAME AN INFLUENCER
Halimy became a TikTok and Instagram influencer after he started his so-called ‘Tent Life’ project, which saw him document his daily encounters after his family fled their home and were forced to live in a tent encampment. He aimed to plant something each day in an attempt to ‘bring life to Earth’ in Gaza.
Halimy, as he often did in videos documenting life’s mundane absurdities in the enclave, had walked to his local internet cafe – rather, a tent with Wi-Fi where displaced Palestinians can connect to the outside world – on Monday to meet Murad.
The pair snapped a selfie, which Halimy captioned on Instagram ‘finally reunited’, and were having a catch up when the missile struck.
