Sha’ban al-Dalou burned alive before the world. May his death awaken us | Zak Witus

We must make this moment a watershed that quenches the hellfire that threatens to envelop Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and the entire region

Last Sunday night, as I was getting ready for bed, my friend Ali from the South Hebron Hills of Palestine sent me a text which read, Israel is burning sleeping people alive in the refugee camps." I clicked on the accompanying video and I could not believe what I saw: an inferno blazing, people running around screaming, and there, amidst the flame, a body writhing, crackling; a raised arm, reaching out for help, still attached to an IV. I waited for the following morning to share the video, until the event had been reported by reputable news outlets, because the images appeared too gruesome to be real - like they were something out of a movie - but they were real: an Israeli airstrike hit near the grounds of al-Aqsa Martyrs' hospital in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah and killed at least four people. The man that we saw burning alive? His name was Sha'ban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old software engineering student.

In the 24 hours since this attack, my social media feed was filled with videos of and reactions to this attack. The reel posted on Instagram by the Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi has been shared more than 455,000 times. The CNN Instagram post has been viewed more than 1.2m times. Randa, a Palestinian friend of mine whose grandparents were born in Gaza, shared that this event was clear proof that Israel was waging a war of annihilation". Survivors of the attack said the fires were caused by gas cooking canisters. Israel blamed secondary explosions" in a statement.

Zak Witus is the young leadership and education coordinator at the New Israel Fund