1.- Youssuf Mohammad Abu Mousa was 7 years old and lived in the Al-Amal neighborhood of Khan Younis with his family when Israel began a massive bombing campaign against the cities of the Gaza Strip.
2.- He was the youngest in the family; his parents, Mohammed and Rawda, had two other children: Joury, the eldest daughter, who was 13, and Hamid, who was 9. His father was a radiologist at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, and Youssuf wanted to become a doctor like his father.
3.- On October 15, 2023, his father went to the hospital and his mother went to a neighbor’s house to get something to eat, leaving Youssuf and his siblings watching TV, which his father had set up using a solar panel. While he was on the street, he heard an explosion in his family’s building.
4.- When Rawan arrived home, Civil Defense and the Palestinian Red Crescent were rescuing victims of the Israeli bombing from the rubble. They pulled out Joury, who was wounded in the head, and Hamid, who was also injured, and took them to the hospital. Other family members had been killed. Youssuf was nowhere to be found.
5.-Rawda went to the hospital with her children, and together with her husband, they searched for Youssuf among the wounded for three hours, asking for “a 7-year-old boy with curly hair, fair skin, and handsome features,” but could not find him—until they discovered him in the morgue, killed in the bombing when the roof collapsed. Her other two children recovered, and the family took refuge at Nasser Hospital.
6.- On February 15, 2024, the IOF besieged Nasser Hospital and ordered an evacuation. Dr. Abu Mousa left with his family. The soldiers detained him, ordered him to undress, and beat him along with the rest of the detainees. He was released in the October 2025 prisoner exchange and welcomed by his two sons and his wife. It was then that he learned that his mother, his younger sister, and his nephews had also been martyred, just like Youssuf.
Dawings by Dolores Collado
Full history to print: 041_youssuf_nino_ENGLISH.pdf
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