Palestine

The man was seen in IDF drone footage from Khan Yunis walking with a limp before being struck by munitions launched from either a drone or a loitering munition.

The IDF confirmed the strike, stating that the man had been “identified as a terrorist observing troops and moving between buildings used for terrorist activity.”

On May 30, […] journalist and pundit Amit Segal published the video on his Telegram channel. The footage, filmed by an IDF drone, showed a figure walking with difficulty before being hit.

Segal did not identify the person or provide context for the killing, but the video gained widespread attention online. Thousands of Israeli users reacted with Israeli flags or “likes.”

An investigation by Haaretz revealed that the man killed was Muhammad al-Farra, an older civilian with cerebral palsy resulting from a childhood car accident. He walked with a limp and had special needs. His sister, Heba al-Farra, who survived the strike, identified him in the video.

Heba is a well-known social media figure in Gaza, where she runs a TikTok channel with over 812,000 followers, mostly focused on food. Throughout the war, she has continued to post cooking videos despite severe shortages.

Seven members of the al-Farra family — including Muhammad’s father and four sisters — were killed earlier in the war. Muhammad was killed while walking to his home in the Satar neighborhood of Khan Yunis on the same day the video was published.

The IDF had ordered the neighborhood evacuated, and much of it had been destroyed by airstrikes. However, many residents, including Muhammad, apparently remained. According to the family, the military did not allow them to retrieve his body for several hours.

“Segal shared the video with the caption ‘Gaza.’ It didn’t matter who the person was — only that he was from Gaza and the people who killed him were Israeli,” wrote Gazan journalist Mosab Abu Toha, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in The New Yorker.

“There’s no further detail because our lives in Gaza don’t matter. I look at that footage — the way this man walked shows he was starving for days. Why the hell would you kill him with a missile? A missile, for one man? Why kill him at all?”

In response, the IDF stated: “At the end of May, the IDF conducted a precision strike against a suspect identified as a terrorist observing our forces and moving between buildings used for terrorist activity. This was a zone of intense fighting, declared a combat area and evacuated of civilians. The IDF operates to minimize harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure in accordance with the laws of war and makes significant efforts to take precautions prior to attacks.”