Killed on her pink roller skates: Photo of a Palestinian girl in Gaza goes viral

For almost a year now, we have been receiving countless images of dead and injured children from the Gaza Strip. They show the magnitude of a war that has cost the lives of tens of thousands of people.

This week, however, one photo in particular stood out: it shows the body of a young girl wrapped in a white shroud and wearing pink roller skates. It was widely shared on social media and quickly became another defining image of the war in Gaza – a place UNICEF has dubbed a “cemetery for children”.

According to Gaza's Health Ministry, more than 40,000 people have been killed by Israeli fire during the war, a third of whom were children.

Ten-year-old Tala Abu Ajwa had managed to survive 332 days of war, bombings, hunger and uncertainty. She and her family had fled on foot from one place to another eight times in the past eleven months, sometimes in the middle of the night.

“She said to me, 'Baba, why can't we live like the other children?'” her father, Hussam Abu Ajwa, tells NPR by phone from Gaza City, a day after her death.

An attack hits a building without warning

It was almost 5pm on Tuesday when the young girl went downstairs to play outside with her 12-year-old brother Salah. Just as Tala reached the ground floor, an explosion rocked the building.

Shrapnel cut through the air and pierced her neck. An Israeli airstrike had hit an apartment in the building that belonged to the Kiheel family, her father said.

“She was killed at the entrance of the building. I heard the air raid and went down to look for her,” he says. It was a bloodbath. She died within minutes.

The Israeli military says it is taking precautions to limit civilian deaths in its hunt for Hamas, which was responsible for the Oct. 7 attack that Israel said killed around 1,200 people.

The Israeli military did not respond to NPR's request for comment on why this residential building in Gaza City was hit.

A striking picture of the consequences of the war for the children in the Gaza Strip

At the hospital, photos show Tala still wearing her pink roller skates and her body wrapped in a white shroud. A man carefully removes her roller skates and gives them to her father. A video shows him crying in disbelief. Her mother can be seen crouched over Tala's body.

“We are all shocked. We could never have imagined something like this,” says their father. “My other children are in shock. It feels like a nightmare,” he says. “Their mother, may God give her strength, is stunned. She cannot believe what has happened.”

According to Abu Ajwa, the airstrike injured several children who are still in hospital and killed eight others, including a neighbor's young son and the Kiheel family, consisting of the man and woman, their three young children and the children's two grandparents.

The girl with the pink skates who loved life

Before the war, Abu Ajwa was a high school chemistry teacher. Thanks to his job, he was able to afford the basic necessities and a few extras to give to his eldest daughter, Tala.

“She really wanted me to buy her the skates,” he says. “I got them for her and, thank God, they were the cause of her death when she fell to the ground. [the stairs to play].”

“She loved to play. She loved life,” he says.

Tala was the middle child and the only girl in the family for most of her life, sandwiched between two brothers until her youngest sister was born about a year ago.

The father shares photos of the family's life before the war with NPR. In one, Tala has her arms wrapped around her father's neck in a pool. In others, she is seen in dresses, headbands, a Daisy Duck sweater and her school uniform. In another, she is covered in foam and laughing.

“Whatever she wanted, I got it for her,” says Abu Ajwa.

The last wishes and the greatest fear of a young girl

Abu Ajwa says he did his best to protect the family, but the roar of Israeli airstrikes frightened Tala at night, so she would run and snuggle into his arms.

“She asked me, 'Why do we live like this, with death and martyrs?' And I replied, 'When the war is over, we will go out and God will reward you,'” he says.

The day before her death, Abu Ajwa said, his daughter told him she dreamed of becoming a dentist and going back to school. The UN says most schools in Gaza were destroyed or damaged in the war. Children have not been to school for nearly a year, and classrooms have turned into overcrowded makeshift shelters for displaced families with nowhere else to go.

Dawoud Abo Alkas / Anadolu via Getty Images

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Anadolu via Getty Images

Tala also had a wish for September: she wanted to celebrate her younger brother's fifth birthday with presents and friends to distract from the war. Abu Ajwa promised her that he would try.

“She was just a kid who went down to innocently play with her roller skates and the other kids,” he says, holding back his tears.

“They killed them with tons of air strikes,” he says, as the sound of an Israeli drone buzzes above him.

NPR's Aya Batrawy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Ahmed Abuhamda contributed reporting from Cairo.

Copyright: NPR