Majd Alhaj (al-Ḥāj)(مجد الحاج) was a Teaching Assistant in Computer Software Development, College of Information Technology at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), and from 2018 onward an online IT Product Manager for the company Salasa-Your Growth Partner in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  He graduated from IUG in Software Development, and described himself as interested in reading and photography, swimming, and a variety of IT topics. 

He was killed on 21 November 2023 at the age of 32 in a harrowing airstrike on his family home in the al-Nusayrat Refugee Camp in Dayr al-Balah Governorate that annihilated 48 people. Twenty-three of the dead were from his own family, among them his wife, Amani Hussein, and their 11-months old daughter, Sara. They left behind a nine-year old son, Abdullatif, and a barely two-months-old daughter, Ayah. The circumstances of their death are relayed in an anguished podcast, Shahid (“Witness”), on YouTube by Majd’s father, Dr. Abdullatif, selected parts of it are transcribed and translated below. 

Dr. Abdullatif, who was responsible for the primary care and psychological health in the hospital sector in the Ministry of Health, describes in the first half of the podcast how the devastation visited by the Israeli attacks on the hospitals was beginning to critically compromise their ability to offer adequate care to the steady stream of people brought in with severe and varied injuries that needed immediate and specialized treatment. Then he tells how being in the middle of the dead and injured, he couldn’t but worry about his own children and grandchildren, for he had concluded that no one was safe in Gaza. 

The dreaded call came at five o’clock in the morning informing him he must rush to another hospital because his own home was hit. And now, just as he had received hundreds of injured people at the hospitals, he had to face the murder of members of his own family, 23 of them, among the 48 killed in the strike. The house, he says, was leveled by a missile equipped with the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) smart guidance system, made by Boeing, ending the lives of all but a few of the people who were sheltering in it. The missile pulverized the structure to the point where, adds Dr. Abdullatif, it took nine days to unearth the bodies of some family members from under the debris— torn bodies, decaying corpses— while some of the buried could not be found months later. They all had been asleep. 

Haltingly, with his voice breaking, and unable to control the flow of his tears, he speaks of the unbearable scene of his dead son, Majd, and his wife Amani, and between them their 11-months-old daughter, Sara, holding onto her father’s body. Sara’s sister, Ayah, only two weeks of age, had a bad head injury, with bleeding in the brain. Their brother, Abdullatif, named after his grandfather, was badly wounded and suffered a broken pelvis. Grieving deeply, the doctor recalls how before the tragedy befell his family, he waited for the war to end, to go back home and find little Sara, hug her, and hold her in his lap—the child he had a special fondness for. 

(Majd, his daughter, Sara, father, Abdullatif and other family members)
Photo credits: Facebook (for both photos)