Playful activism: Displaced young Palestinians are chronicling their wartime routines on TikTok and Instagram, allowing their followers abroad to see a more personal side of the conflict. — Photos: Al-Halimy & M.Faris’ Instagram/©2024 NYTC
SEVEN months into the war in the Gaza Strip, Mohammed Said al-Halimy began documenting his daily routine in earnest.
Al-Halimy, known by his friends and online as Medo, already had a teenager’s knack for capturing sunsets, songs and life’s milestones in short video snippets. That life was fractured after Israeli bombs fell on Gaza in response to the Hamas-led Oct 7, 2023, attack, destroying his university and forcing him into a makeshift beach campsite.
As months of fighting ground into the summer, and his displacement became more entrenched, al-Halimy turned his phone camera to the surreal experience of everyday reality in dystopian circumstances.
“I wanted to show something positive, some resilience despite the daily suffering,” al-Halimy, 19, said in a July interview, adding that he hoped to capture an “unseen side of our lifestyle.”
Palestinians trapped in Gaza have been recording the war since it began, in often harrowing videos that have given a close-up view of the Israeli bombardment to millions of people worldwide. Many of their posts – raw, personal and at times graphic – went viral early in the conflict as traditional news media outlets struggled to get reporters into the blockaded enclave.
Now, young Palestinians in Gaza are sharing a different window into their lives: their routines amid a year-old war with seemingly no end in sight.
Al-Halimy began posting about the hourslong wait to fill containers with drinking water, about concocting recipes with limited food supplies, and about a new garden plot he created in the soil beside the tent encampment that had for months been his family’s shelter. Showing his new baby mint plant to his Instagram followers, he asked, “Tell me in the comments, what should I name her?”
More than 6,000 miles away in central Florida, Sierra Taft, 36, was watching, checking al-Halimy’s accounts regularly for updates and worrying about his wellbeing.
“He felt like somebody that if I had met face to face, I could be best friends with,” she said.
A still image from a video on the Instagram account of Mohammed Said alHalimy in Gaza.
Life in Gaza through Instagram
Some Palestinians in Gaza document how they cook meals over open fires, using whatever few ingredients are available. Others unpack aid boxes or share exercise routines where doorways double as pull-up bars. And some show how friendly football and chess games are squeezed between piles of rubble and long lines for water.
With a command of English and growing followings, these Palestinian creators share their perspectives and appeal for help using the language of online influencers around the world who have amassed vast audiences by filming the minutiae of their lives.
So, when Palestinian creators like al-Halimy portray normal activities such as exercising or cooking against the backdrop of war, it is “a language that reaches,” said Laura Cervi, an associate professor of journalism at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who has studied Palestinian activism online.
“It’s not a number. It’s not like the complex journalistic vernacular,” she said, adding that from the perspective of viewers, “It’s a guy like me that is telling me that he exists – in the way I exist.”
Before the war, Mohammed Faris said his favourite place was the gym. Faris, a Khan Younis resident, had just started his first year at Al-Aqsa University when the war broke out. His parents, employees of UNRWA, the main United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, encouraged him to start documenting his life. Since April, he has been sharing his diet and exercise routines under the account “Gymrat in Gaza,” which has gained more than 180,000 followers.
“Why not grab this opportunity to talk to the world?” he said in a recent interview from Khan Younis while refilling his supply of water. Faris said he had raised nearly US$13,000 (RM58,062) online since he started posting videos, and hoped eventually to evacuate his family from Gaza. He said his audience enjoyed it when he incorporated memes and jokes. “I like to add this touch of sense of humour,” he said.
But he struggles with the instability of being displaced from his home and the scarcity of healthy foods, he said. Finding stable internet connections can be a challenge, and he sometimes waits hours for a video to upload.
“What I want people to receive from my vlogs is that we are trying to cope with the situation,” he said.
The fighting has pushed most Palestinians in Gaza into shrinking areas designated by Israel as “humanitarian zones,” though UN officials and aid groups have said that no place in Gaza is safe and they fear famine.
Some viewers have criticised al-Halimy and others like him, accusing them of sharing misinformation, or questioning their struggle given their lighthearted messaging.
“I’m just showing you the 1% of my life – the 1% that I’m trying to have fun,” he said in a video posted in May. He added: “We’ve been through hell.”
A global reach
Even before the war, young Palestinians were adopting the lighter tone of online social media to conduct what Cervi calls “playful activism,” pointing to TikTok trends that incorporate humour to make political points.
The insistence on sharing everyday routines or incorporating a lighter tone into material about the war, she added, is its own form of defiance.
“It’s very political because they’re saying, ‘We’re surviving and we will keep on,’” she said. Framing these videos as lifestyle content, she said, makes it more likely that social media algorithms will share them with a broader audience.
Activists elsewhere have used playfully framed videos on social media platforms to share messaging about other causes, Cervi said, such as the struggle to combat the killing of women in Latin America.
Researchers say that social media postings not only can elevate causes but tend to simplify them by removing nuance and centring on each creator’s perspective. What seem like candid moments can actually be carefully chosen and edited for effect.
Al-Halimy said creating videos helped him endure his everyday hardships.
“I do my best to set up new, bright sides of my tent life and make it a day to remember,” he said in an interview in the summer. “A moment of pain, to a moment of hope.”
A graduate of a high school for gifted students, al-Halimy had studied in Texas under a State Department program. He said in July that his family had decided to stay together in Gaza, instead of being separated. His online following was growing fast, and he hoped to raise enough money for them all to leave.
On Aug 25, he shared his final video on Instagram. The next afternoon, according to a friend who was with him, al-Halimy was at a makeshift cafe in Khan Younis when he was struck in the head by shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike. His brother, Zeid al-Halimy, said that he died at a Khan Younis hospital.
In the months since al-Halimy’s death, his followers have been re-watching his videos and have left dozens of tributes in the comments. Some vowed to plant mint in their own gardens to remember him, and a fundraising effort for his family has surged to more than US$137,000.
Weeks after his death, Taft, who had never met al-Halimy in person, said she still thought about him every day. She compared losing him to another recent blow, the death of a close school friend.
“It’s the same feeling of loss,” she said.
Other Palestinians she followed online are never far from her mind.
“I’m wondering who the next one is going to be,” she said. — © 2024 The New York Times Company
