Palestinian Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa was killed last week during an Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip. His family in Zichem remains orphaned. “He promised us he would come home soon.”
A dead end street near the village center of Zichem. It is not a long search for the house of the Abu Daqqa family. A Palestinian flag on the facade, a whole series of parked cars in front of the door. In the garage next to the house, about thirty men sit around two coal fires. They drink boiling hot coffee and tea, stoked on the fires with which they try to keep warm. All friends and family of Samer Abu Daqqa, the 45-year-old cameraman who died in the Gaza Strip last Friday. Gathered in Zichem to support Samer’s family.
That family – mother Rana and four children – has been living in Zichem for just over six months. The house with the red facade is now their third place of residence since they fled to our country from Gaza five years ago.
They spent the first years in a shelter in Arendonk, from there they moved to a social housing nearby, but now the family of five lives a little more spaciously. It was also here that Samer wanted to come and live. Preferably as soon as possible. When his family fled to Belgium, he was left behind in Gaza. It was only a few months ago that he was able to travel to Belgium for the first time. “It had been six years since we had seen him,” says Zain, Samer’s 15-year-old son. With a black and white checked Arafat scarf around his neck, he tells his story very quietly.
In recent days, Zain has emerged as a spokesperson for the family. His mother Rana and his sister Yara are too impressed by the events to tell their story. “They have hardly slept the past few days,” says Zain. “Just cried.” Eldest brother Yazan also indicates that he now especially needs rest. Ezal, the youngest in the family at 12, does not seem to understand what is going on.
Promise
Samer’s blitz visit to our country last summer ends abruptly when he receives a phone call from Al Jazeera, his employer, at the end of September. The news channel urgently needs a cameraman in the Gaza Strip and so Samer, who has worked for Al Jazeera for twenty years, boards the plane. With the promise that he will return soon. Zain: “He planned to work in Belgium and come to live here. With us.”
Those plans change when Hamas invades Israel on October 7 and war breaks out in Gaza. Returning to Belgium was not an option for their father, says Zain. “He really wanted to stay in Gaza. To show the world what happened there. Even though he knew it was dangerous.”
For three months, Zain and his family closely followed the news from Gaza. Every time a report comes in about injured or killed journalists, they are terrified. In an attempt to reassure them, Samer calls home every day. “Short conversations,” says Zain. “Often it was no more than one sentence: ‘I’m okay.’ There just wasn’t time for more. Dad was constantly busy, he didn’t sleep more than three hours a night.”
Singing career
There was also contact last week, just before things went wrong. “We talked about my latest song,” says Zain. “He was sorry he hadn’t heard it yet.” Zain turns out to be a talented singer, who makes songs in English and Arabic that appear to do quite well on YouTube.
He has almost 300,000 subscribers on that platform and his most popular video has been viewed 22 million times on YouTube alone. “It was Dad’s big dream that I would become a great singer. Someone who would be known not only in the Arab world, but everywhere.”
After that phone call, Zain leaves for Diest, where he goes to school. He is picked up from class there a few hours later. Something has happened to his father and he needs to go home immediately.
Samer and his colleague Wael Al-Dahdouh were reporting on a bombing of a school building in the town of Khan Younis when they themselves were caught in an Israeli bombardment there. Al-Dahdouh, who became world news in October when he was told live on air that his family had been killed, was slightly injured and was able to flee. Samer, who is seriously injured in his leg, fails and stays behind.
Al-Dahdouh informs his colleague’s family, who immediately starts calling. “We called everyone from Belgium who could help,” says Zain. “We sent ambulances, called the International Red Cross, brought people to the scene, but no one got to my father.”
According to Al Jazeera, the emergency services were stopped by the Israeli army. The location where their cameraman was located was also said to have been deliberately targeted.
Zain doesn’t understand. “My father was only doing his job. He was there with his camera and was not a danger to anyone.” The cameraman’s family remains with many questions about the precise circumstances of his death. They plan to file a complaint against Israel with the International Criminal Court. Abu Daqqa’s employer Al Jazeera is also calling on the same International Criminal Court to take action against what it calls “the systematic Israeli attacks on journalists and their families”.
