Youssef Salem arrived at the meeting carrying his computer. At the start of the weekend, he had chosen a restaurant not far from his home, located in a modest residential district in the west of Istanbul. "I like this café because you can smoke hookah here," said the 34-year-old Palestinian. Day after day since the beginning of the war, he had been recording the names of his close and extended family members who have died in Gaza in an Excel spreadsheet, along with the dates and circumstances of their disappearance. To date, his list already contained 270 names, spread over four generations. The oldest was 90, the youngest just a few months old. "These were my uncles, my cousins, my aunts, their children and grandchildren," explained Salem, in a surprisingly calm and detached tone. "In Gaza, we're all very close. We grow up together. We marry each other and we support each other."

Before the war, the Salem clan consisted of between 700 and 800 people. "A third of our extended family was wiped out," said this man whose hair, despite his young age, was already whitening. With his wife, Nejah, and their daughter, Ayloul, he now lives in Istanbul, where he works for an NGO. The family left Gaza in 2021. That year, in May, Israel waged an 11-day war against the territory, killing over 250 Palestinians. It was the first major conflict the young couple had experienced since the birth of their daughter in 2019. "We told ourselves that it wasn't possible to raise our child in the midst of one war after another. But the one happening today is nothing like the ones we've experienced," observed Salem, a law graduate from Al-Azhar University in Gaza.

In August, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor counted more than 2,750 families who had lost at least three members to Israeli attacks over the previous 11 months. According to the NGO, over 365 Gazan families also have lost more than 10 members in the ongoing war. "These are not isolated incidents: Many families have seen several generations wiped out in a single strike," explained Ramy Abdu, Euro-Med chairman. "It's as if entire families disappeared overnight." In all, nearly 42,000 people have been killed in the last 12 months in the Palestinian territory, according to the Hamas health authorities, a figure validated by international organizations.

Salem's life changed on the night of December 12, 2023. On that day, in the Sheikh Redwan district of Gaza City, six buildings housing 130 people on Al-Salem Street, named after the clan, were pulverized by a salvo of Israeli missiles. At dawn the next day, Salem discovered 40 missed calls from the Gaza Strip on his telephone. Eventually, he learned that 102 members of his family had died. One of his cousins, Mohamed Farid Salem, filmed the six destroyed buildings. Salem carefully saved this precious video on his computer, along with other images and documents relating to the death of his relatives.

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