Popular Gaza Creator May Have Been Killed By Gunshot, Not Shrapnel, Doctors Say
Medo Halimy, who showed day-to-day life in Gaza, was reported killed as a bystander to an airstrike. Doctors say he may have been shot in the head.
The Trump administration has escalated its crackdown on Columbia University students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza by sending ICE agents to detain, and potentially deport, a U.S. permanent resident who was one of the lead negotiators on behalf of pro-Palestine protesters at 2024’s Gaza solidarity encampment.
This morning, Mahmoud Khalil—a Palestinian with Algerian citizenship who holds a green card—made a phone call to his eight-month pregnant wife from ICE custody. It was Khalil’s first contact with his family since he was detained on Saturday by ICE agents who raided his student housing facility at Columbia. The next steps in his case are as yet unknown, but protests and legal measures are reportedly planned to try and stop the Trump administration from deporting Khalil.
The war in the Gaza Strip, now under investigation as a genocide by the International Court of Justice, has galvanized the conscience of young people around the world – notwithstanding attempts to suppress free speech on the subject. The below story about the death of a young creator in Gaza, who became famous for their TikTok videos about daily life in the territory before being killed in the Israeli military assault, is just one of many that have helped drive a groundswell of moral outrage in campuses and communities across the world.
—Murtaza Hussain
Last year, Mohammad “Medo” Halimy, a 19-year old Palestinian born and raised in Gaza, briefly became a star on social media for his TikTok page showing his day-to-day life during Israel’s war. “I kept watching videos about Gaza online, and they were all very sad and depressing. Since I am a positive person, I didn’t like any of those videos. So, I decided to create a page on TikTok and start posting my daily life on both TikTok and Instagram, focusing only on the positive aspects,” Halimy said in an interview last summer.
His TikTok page, which showed Halimy cooking, gardening, waiting for water, and spending time with friends, rapidly amassed a large following, growing to nearly 190,000 followers. But Halimy’s online celebrity was cut short last summer, when he was killed by what was reported to be shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike.
Halimy’s death prompted an outpouring of grief from his followers across the world. Initial reports framed his death as collateral damage from an airstrike carried out by the Israeli military, and interviews given by friends of Halimy to the international press also stated that an explosion targeting a nearby car had preceded his death. But an American doctor who treated Halimy in Gaza, attempting to save his life after he was brought into the intensive care unit of Nasser Hospital, said that his wounds were not consistent with shrapnel from an airstrike. Instead, there was a single entry and exit point from his skull.
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“He was brought in after an airstrike on the Mawasi tent encampment on a day when there were multiple mass casualty incidents. Some young people had been sitting at a makeshift internet cafe, including students studying for tests. Lots of patients had shrapnel injuries, but he had only two wounds, and both were in his head,” said Dr. Mimi Syed, an emergency medicine physician who has completed two medical missions to Gaza. “There was one entry and exit point, and on the CT scan it looks like a clear path. Usually with shrapnel, you’d have pieces of shrapnel still lodged inside the brain, or multiple injuries to the face. He had no other internal injuries, or injuries to other parts of the body that are common with shrapnel.”
Drop Site reviewed CT scans taken from Halimy’s injury as well as video taken of Halimy, unconscious, being intubated and treated by emergency medical personnel at Nasser Hospital. While not conclusive, the information provided suggested a gunshot wound to the head as a possible cause of death. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.
While quadcopter drones and military aircraft were active in the area, and Halimy was brought to Nasser Hospital along with many other individuals who had been injured in an airstrike, the hospital also saw injuries come in from gunshot wounds. Syed, who has been active on multiple medical relief missions during the war, says the injury he suffered suggested strongly that Halimy had been killed by a gunshot.
“I was the one who intubated him. I tried to save his life but I couldn't,” added Syed. “I have treated many gunshot wounds to the head in my career, and they present this way. The path that the object took was very indicative.”
Drop Site shared the scans and video with two medical experts to get secondary assessments.
“If there were no other injuries involved, it would be incredibly rare for a shrapnel injury to have such an isolated trajectory or injury. There should've been some other debris embedded in his body elsewhere which they likely would have seen on any x-rays that they did,” said Zain Qazi, a doctor and board certified diagnostic radiologist. “I've seen a lot of gunshot wounds to the head that look very similar. Sometimes the bullet is still embedded in the soft tissues or the skull, and shrapnel very likely would also have embedded itself somewhere in the bony structure or soft tissues. Oftentimes with smaller caliber bullets the bullet will fragment and have small metallic debris in the head, which we don't see here.”
“These scans are highly suspicious of a gunshot wound to the head,” he added.
“The trajectory is really suspicious to be that precise,” added Nabeel Rana, another American doctor who had participated on past medical missions to Gaza. “Having said that, the typical sniper bullets we would see in these isolated gunshots would use larger calibre bullets so the exit wounds were usually pretty large.” The video, he said, did not show a clear enough view of the exit wound on Halimy’s head to make a conclusive determination, and that some small single shrapnel wounds had killed people in Gaza in his experience.
“My Tent Life”
For months after the start of the Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip, Halimy broadcast videos showing what he described as “my tent life,” during the war. Halimy gathered over 100,000 followers on TikTok for his videos, which showed him cooking meals, having tea with friends, growing plants, and showing the ways in which young Gazans of his generation were attempting to create a sense of normalcy amid the chaos of the war.
In a video from August 10, 2024, Halimy showed the plants he was growing near his tent “A lot of you ask me why I plant,” he said to the camera. “Planting for me is a form of resistance, I bring life to earth. They’re taking away life, but I’m bringing it to earth.”
That video was one of the last Halimy made. On August 26, Halimy was brought to Nasser Hospital, where he died several hours later.
Born and raised in Gaza City as one of six siblings, Halimy, who spoke fluent English, also had connections to the United States. In 2021, he participated in the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study program, which brought him to study for a year at Harker Heights High School in Texas. After Israel’s siege began, Halimy and his family were displaced to the Mawasi tent encampment after their home was destroyed and they were instructed to evacuate to the area, officially deemed a “safe zone” by the Israeli military.
The Mawasi encampment has been repeatedly targeted for attacks by the Israeli military, despite being one of the last designated refuges for the Palestinian population in the territory. Following Halimy’s death, Israeli officials told media outlets that they could not confirm that they had carried out an attack in the area, but that they remained focused on “countering threats while persisting to mitigate harm to civilians.”
After he was killed, friends of Halimy from his time in Texas spoke publicly to express sadness over his death, describing him as “warm” and full of “positive energy.” An Instagram page for alumni of the Kennedy-Lugar exchange program, which is administered by the U.S. State Department, also shared a post expressing “profound sorrow at the tragic passing of Mohammad ‘Medo’ Halimy.” That post did not indicate how Halimy had died, and, unlike other posts on its accounts, closed it off from comments.
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Two months before he was killed, Halimy was featured in an NBC News story highlighting the stories of influencers in Gaza during the war. In his comments for the story, Halimy mentioned that behind the generally upbeat content that he and others produced on their pages, their attempts at broadcasting a slice of life in Gaza to the world came with great difficulty.
“I think people misunderstand the fact that we’re actually struggling,” Halimy said, in response to questions on his page from viewers asking about the tone of his posts. “They see me having fun in a 50-second video, a minute-long video, and they forget the whole day of struggles that I don’t show to them.”
The blood of this young Palestinian and that of tens of thousands of others is on the heads of all those who have stood by and alowed this holocaust to continue, fueled by the United States government and others in the West. The world has lost so much goodness, as expressed by Medo, Hind and countlss others. By trying to erase a people from history, the blind world has in the end erased itsself. We are lessnow than before, and no one now thinks we have any answers.
Would anyone be surprised if it was a targeted assassination by Israel?