Basel Alhaj (Basil al-Ḥāj) (باسل الحاج) was both an academic and a computer software and information technology (IT) specialist working with government when he was killed together with many members of his family in an Israeli air raid in November 2023. He served as a Teaching Assistant, first at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) for one semester and, starting in 2019, at al-Aqsa University. He received an MSc in IT from the IUG in 2019 and a BSc in Computer Science from al-Aqsa University in 2015. 

On his LinkedIn page where he elaborates on his education and various aspects of his work, he cites a conference paper, “Predicting User Entries by Using Data Mining Algorithms,” he co-authored with Ashraf al-Maghari and published in the online IEEE Xplore, 2017. And on his Facebook page, he cites another paper co-authored with his advisor, Professor Iyad al-Agha, “”Exploiting Wikipedia to Measure the Semantic Relatedness between Arabic Terms,” which appeared in the Journal of the Islamic University School of Engineering. 

Alhaj’s work with the government included programming and archiving and electronic systems for the Ministers’ Council, and developing financial and administrative systems for several government divisions. He was a member of Gaza Data Science Team, and was awarded the prize for a big data competition organized by UCAS Technology Incubator in 2018. The UCAS Technology Incubator is a Gaza-based “innovation hub based in the Gaza Strip, dedicated to… nurturing new entrepreneurs, creative types, and startups (for more information on UCAS, see also the biography of Mohammad Saleh Hassouna in this collection).

His cousin with the same name, a well-known online roaming chef, movingly narrates in Arabic the killing of Alhaj with ten other family members, bringing the family death toll to thirteen. They lost their lives, he says, with one rocket that hit their house. He underlines the fact that Basel did not bear arms and there were no tunnels under his home, alluding to the Israeli bogus claims about the presence of tunnels for the resistance under hospitals and schools etc. “We were naïve,” he laments and then adds that his cousin, Basel, was a young man and had a wife and children, and held hopes for them all. But it was his destiny to die in Gaza, which he refused to forsake.

Alhaj was married to Somaya Kamal Abu Oun (see her bio in this archive). He had posted a picture of their daughter Jana, then in second grade, celebrating her prize for excelling in the English language, and an announcement of the birth of their son, `Abd al-Rahman on October 1, 2021.

(Alhaj attending a friend’s memorial in 2021)

Photo credits: Facebook (both photos)