By Moon Younes
Written in honor of her legacy
Education does not always unfold in classrooms. It can live in kitchens, shelters, or on phone screens—any place where a person insists on sharing knowledge, care, and hope. In Gaza, where schools are rubble and childhoods cut short, education persists in unexpected forms. Against the background of the ongoing genocide, a child can be driven to take up the mantle of teacher.
Yaqeen Hammad has been described as Gaza’s youngest influencer. She has been called a journalist and a humanitarian, but she was above all a teacher. She was a living indictment of the system that demanded a child to take on these roles, as they suffer the heaviest price of the ongoing genocide. The Israeli extermination campaign against Gaza has deliberately robbed children of their childhoods, destroying their classrooms and rewriting the rhythms of their lives with displacement, siege, starvation, and fear. In this broken landscape, Yaqeen stepped forward—not as a symbol, but as a young girl with immense heart and remarkable clarity—to teach and influence her people towards hope.
Yaqeen created joy with whatever tools she could find: firewood, dates, a smartphone. With these, she taught children how to cook without gas, how to conserve and purify water, and how to smile—gently, defiantly—despite the trauma surrounding them. She showed the world how Gaza’s people were rebuilding their lives, how water was sourced, cleaned, and shared, how resilience took the form of mutual aid. Alongside her brother Mohamed, she distributed food, toys, and clothes to displaced families, embodying a spirit of generosity well beyond her years. Her charisma, reminiscent of international television host Ahmad Al-Shugairi, lent her videos a tone of confident warmth and educational tact—even borrowing soundtracks from his program to highlight Gaza’s ingenuity amidst devastation. Though her reach mirrored that of a child star, her calling was that of a teacher. She did more than document survival—she modeled it. Not because anyone told her to, but because everything else had been stripped away. And in that void, she rose, not with bitterness, but with responsibility. When hope thinned, she handed it out freely. This is what it meant, in Gaza, for a child to become a teacher.
Yaqeen was killed by an Israeli airstrike on May 23, 2025, in her family’s shelter in Al-Baraka, Deir al-Balah, already a site of severe displacement and scarcity. She was eleven years old.
This essay honors her life and the children of Gaza who, like her, are forced to grow up too soon—to carry the impossible weight of teaching, surviving, and leading before they have been allowed to learn and live.
Yaqeen was one of more than 16,500 children killed in Gaza since October 2023, yet her death represents more than a statistic. It symbolizes a generation whose potential is being violently erased. In her brief life, Yaqeen amassed over 100,000 followers, by her perseverance and light despite the heaviness of her content, by engaging in humanitarian aid distribution to her people. She was featured many times on her followers’ social media after she herself gained a massive following sharing videos on survival. Arabic media dubbed her “صانعة الخير” (Sāniʿat al‑Khayr)—the Maker of Good—and her content became a humanitarian lifeline, offering both practical knowledge and emotional encouragement to grieving families. In one video, she smiles as she hands out Eid money to children and families; in another, she safely demonstrates how to light a fire and boil water. At a time when Gaza’s formal education had collapsed, her Instagram became a living classroom teaching children and adults how to adjust to their grim new reality with care and love.
Her final posts brimmed with warmth and generosity and her unwavering commitment to education. On May 4th she shared:
“We are still holding Quran and education classes despite the famine, siege, and the continuation of genocide, with empty stomachs and believing hearts, this is the message to the world.”
According to Hindustan Times and NewsX, she expressed a wish to be “someone who makes the children forget the war, even for a moment.” She spoke of becoming a teacher someday. Many who worked with her say she already was.
Yaqeen often appeared alongside her brother, Mohamed Hammad, a volunteer with the Ouena Collective—a grassroots relief effort providing toys, speech therapy, and seed grants for small businesses. Together, they handed out supplies to families displaced by shelling and siege.
Hours after the strike on May 23, her body was pulled from the rubble. The explosion destroyed her entire apartment block, reducing her makeshift studio to silence.
Yaqeen is mourned not only in Gaza, but around the world. She has trended in Arabic social media as a symbol of the “murdered future” and “education under siege.” Journalists, aid workers, and educators have paid tribute, recalling how her posts delivered daily strength and sorrow.
She is survived by her siblings and her uncle, a paramedic, and leaves behind a digital legacy that continues to inspire. At a time when Gaza’s educational system has been systematically dismantled—schools bombed, teachers killed, and students traumatized—Yaqeen built her own classroom out of faith, firewood, and unwavering compassion.
Despite her moral clarity, unshakable courage, and radiant passion to teach, Yaqeen Hammad was a child with firewood and a smartphone, not a flak vest or press badge. And yet she was targeted like an adult journalist. Since October 7, Israel has killed over 226 Palestinian journalists, turning reporting into a death sentence. Yaqeen wasn’t embedded with a news agency, but she documented, taught, and consoled. That was enough to make her a target.
She was also targeted as an educator. With her chalkboard made of grief and hope, she joined the ranks of hundreds of teachers, professors, and education workers in Gaza killed since March 2025 . Yaqeen was martyred in her home—not a base, not a military site—just like the more than 16,500 Palestinian children murdered by this illegal campaign of collective punishment since October 7.
She taught through screens and soot. She laughed as she handed out ice cream. She died as a teacher, a journalist, a daughter, a student—and a child—murdered because she insisted on being a source of light in a genocide engineered to smother it.
May Yaqeen be remembered not only as a casualty of war, but as a teacher of life in the ruins, a builder of meaning when all else collapsed. Gaza’s children lost one of their brightest stars. But Yaqeen Hammad’s light endures, pixel by pixel, heart by heart.