Saleh al-Jafarawi, a social media influencer in the Gaza Strip who became well-known to Israelis and others after cheering Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, was killed Sunday during armed clashes between Hamas and Palestinian militias in Gaza City.
Footage circulating online showed his body.
According to the reports, Jafarawi was killed by the militias while covering the incident.
He gained wide attention with a video he recorded on October 7, 2023, in which he praised Hamas’s attack. Later in the war, he filmed himself crying in reaction to Israel’s airstrikes. Pro-Israel activists juxtaposed the two videos and gave him the nickname “Mr. FAFO” (an acronym for “fuck around and find out.”)
In the following weeks, videos went viral in which Jafarawi appeared to impersonate a doctor, a wounded patient, a fighter, a journalist, and people of other roles, drawing widespread mockery among pro-Israel figures for what appeared to be lazy propaganda.
During the war, Jafarawi was accused in social media reports of pocketing millions of dollars he had raised as donations for Gaza residents.
“Controversial Gaza activist, derogatorily called ‘Mr. FAFO’ due to his performative antics and well known for his support of Hamas and raising an estimated $10 million to build a children’s hospital, only to pocket the money, Saleh Al-Jafarawi, was killed today by unknown assailants,” wrote the Palestinian-American anti-Hamas activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
Alkhatib posted on X that Jafarawai “was allegedly accompanying Hamas’s ‘Saham’ unit during clashes with the Doghmosh clan in Gaza City, possibly as a cameraman of sorts. Hamas-affiliated Telegram channels have been announcing his death, possibly as a way to incite further violence against the clan and justify even more killing of perceived opposition and alleged criminal elements.”
In a second post, Gaza-born Alkhatib assessed that the influencer “was killed by 3 possible players in Gaza: Hamas to steal his digital wallet & instigate a civil war; the Doghmosh clan because he participated in Hamas raids against them; or anti-Hamas fighters because he was a terror propagandist. His body showed signs of torture.”
Jafarawi was glorified in an Instagram post by US activist group Students for Justice in Palestine, which shared an image of the influencer with the caption: “Death to the occupation. Death to Zionism. Death to collaborators.”
New York-based Within Our Lifetime, another prominent anti-Israel protest group, also mourned the Gazan social media personality, asserting on X that he was “murdered earlier today by zionist collaborators in Gaza after having a target on his back by the occupation for months.”
The group shared an excerpt from what it said was Jafarawi’s “last will and testament,” in which he told his followers: “I urge you to hold fast to the resistance — to the path we walked, and the cause we believed in. We have known no other way for ourselves, nor found any meaning in life except by remaining steadfast upon it.”
Also among those eulogizing the slain influencer was Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani. Duwaji shared a post about “beloved” Jafarawi to her Instagram story. She also posted a photo of Jafarawi wearing a press jacket, adding four broken-heart emojis.
Meanwhile, pro-Israel accounts largely made light of Jafarawi’s death, or took issue with those who praised him.
“For the last two years, I have followed Hamas content creator Saleh Al-Jafrawi (‘Mr FAFO’) with a mix of horror and admiration. I was engrossed. Mr FAFO had phenomenal energy, charisma, and creativity. Always popping up in a different costume, once a patient then a radiologist, a jihadist then a foreign correspondent, a ham actor but always with panache and chutzpah, constantly finding inventive ways to grab new audiences and tell his story,” wrote former Israeli spokesperson Eylon Levy.
“Early in the war, I thought: in another life, we could have been great friends. He seemed like an absolute riot and barrel of laughs. We could have been mates, in another life, in which he did not dedicate his talents for evil, using his voice to fight for the genocidal terrorist army that perpetrated the October 7 Massacre and chose to fight a bloody urban war from under the feet of the civilians it kept trapped as human sacrifices,” he said.