A landfill located next to a camp sheltering displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, on April 16, 2026. ABDEL KAREEM HANA/AP
Amid the terrified screams of children, teacher Ayman Rihan carried his daughter Ritaj in his arms to take her to the hospital. The footage he shared by phone with Le Monde shows him holding the lifeless body of the 9-year-old girl, her eyes fixed and her mouth overflowing with blood. (Israeli authorities have barred international media from entering the enclave for the past two and a half years.) But at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which Ayman had to reach on a donkey-drawn cart due to the lack of available vehicles, the young girl was pronounced dead.
On the morning of April 9, Ritaj Rihan was shot in the mouth while attending her mathematics class under a tent serving as a makeshift classroom in an improvised school in Beit Lahia. According to witnesses, the gunfire came from the area controlled by the Israeli army. The army did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Le Monde.
"The scene haunts me. I am not able to return to school, and neither is my son. Half of the students no longer come," said the traumatized teacher, who, like all the witnesses in this article, was interviewed remotely. Ritaj's parents have not recovered from the shock either. "My daughter had just resumed classes after more than two years of interruption due to the destruction of schools. But the Israelis do not want our children to be educated. They want to kill them," confided her mother, Ola, in tears. Ola lost her own mother and her sister in Israeli bombings during the war of annihilation that followed the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023.
