Marwa Yousuf K.
“There is no other way towards liberation but resistance. There couldn’t possibly be any other way… You must fight. You must get martyred. There is a tax that we must pay.”
These are Saleh al-Jafarawi’s words. Twenty seven, a journalist, a hāfidh of Allāh’s Book… and now a shahīd.
Saleh didn’t fall in an airstrike, though they tried. He wasn’t taken out by a drone or vanished beneath debris, nor did he starve or choke on the smoke of phosphorus bombs. He survived all of that and stood tall for two years through a genocide, only to be killed by those who speak his language and walked his streets.
Saleh was abducted and murdered in cold blood by collaborators – gangs and militias armed, trained, and unleashed by the Zionist entity to destabilise, divide, and destroy Gaza from within. These are not wayward factions, they are mercenaries and the most depraved form of life: those who sell their souls for shekels. This rot was cultivated and deployed by occupation, used when bombs and when blockades failed to finish the job. The collaborator wounds from within; he disguises himself as your neighbour, then buries a blade in your spine. These traitors may not have worn the Star of David, but their bullets carried its imprint.
It doesn’t feel real. It’s not meant to. His voice still echoes – urgent, breathless, full of conviction. His face still too vivid, burnt into the backlight of our screens. He wasn’t just documenting the genocide – he was holding our cowardly faces to it, making sure we didn’t look away.
This is not a death but a desecration. And it should wound each of us who still claim to care about Palestine, about justice, about what truly matters: life itself. Because Saleh al-Jafarawi wasn’t simply a journalist, and the word activist never fit him. He was a front-line witness, a documentarian of dignity. He filmed the dead with reverence and the living with pride.
He knelt beside children pulled from the rubble and spoke to them not as an observer but as someone who knew what it meant to lose everything and somehow helped them smile.
Saleh did not plead for pity – he showed the world why Gaza’s spirit cannot be broken. In his final post, his voice swelled with defiance:
“By God, you need a million years to break the will of these people, and you won’t break it. From the very next day, the bulldozers came down to open the roads, and the people didn’t wait for reconstruction, starting to rebuild themselves, repairing their homes themselves, and removing the rubble from in front of their houses themselves. God is Great, what a people you are, and by God, we deserve life, by God. Praise be to God in any case.”
Saleh showed the world Gaza’s spine, not just its suffering. Every word he spoke held meaning and was shared by a man who had already written his will, a man who knew his name was on the enemy’s list of targets, and still chose to walk straight. He spoke like someone who loved something greater than his own breath, and was ready to lose both for it.
There was no pretense of neutrality in his work. No soft language made to soothe foreign ears. Saleh called the resistance what it was: legitimate, sacred, necessary. He was a principled son of Gaza – unwavering in his defence of the resistance who fights for its freedom. Not in whispers, not behind closed doors, not in veiled terms but openly.
He never pretended neutrality imposed by NGOs, never sought approval from international donors or groups and refused to water down the truth for Western consumption. He stood with the resistance – the al-Qassām brigades – without hesitation and with conviction.
Let the record show that Saleh al-Jafarawi didn’t play semantic games or draw false equivalences. He named collaborators as collaborators and martyrs as martyrs. He did not run, did not trade his principles for comfort or a seat abroad. He didn’t rebrand himself for global digestibility. He stayed. He chose to stay, to bleed with Gaza, to speak of its rage as well as its pain.
And that is precisely why Western media will not mourn him. No statements from “human rights” organisations, no candlelight vigils in Western capitals. Saleh was not their kind of martyr; he did not beg, nor did he dilute his language to be more palatable. He was not digestible. He stood with the resistance and defended its right to exist. For that, he will be ignored by institutions that prefer Palestinian corpses to Palestinian clarity.
Saleh refused to fit their template – the Palestinian who suffers but does not resist, who is pitied but never powerful. Saleh shattered that image, and in doing so, reminded the world what dignity acts and sounds like under siege.
La. Saleh al-Jafarawi lived and died as a thorn in their neck.
Let no one rewrite him.
Do not let them say he was neutral, for he was not. Do not let them say he was impartial, for he was not.
Do not let them say he was caught in the crossfire, for he was not. He was deliberate, aligned, principled, and unflinching.
He knew the enemy would come for him, yet he did not bow. For martyrdom, to people like Saleh, is not tragedy but honour, the final seal on a life lived with integrity.
In Islām, the martyr is not dead. Allāh says in Sūrat Āl-‘Imrān:
“And do not say about those who are killed in the way of Allāh, ‘They are dead.’ Rather, they are alive, but you perceive it not.” (3:169)
Saleh al-Jafarawi lives. Not only in barzakh but in the memory of a people he refused to abandon. Every video he filmed, every body he honoured, every word he spoke was a refusal to let Palestine be reduced to numbers and negotiations. His camera did not flatten stories into statistics but extracted dignity from disaster.
May Allāh raise him among the shuhadāʾ. May his blood be heavier on the scales than all the silence in this world. May every traitor that served the enemy to kill him be dragged in humiliation. And may every one of us who claims to care about Palestine remember this: if you are not standing where Saleh stood, you are not standing at all.
“Always stand with the Resistance Don’t leave the Resistance alone
Because our pride and dignity lie in the Resistance Our freedom is in the Resistance
And if we ourselves abandon the Resistance, no one else will stand with them So don’t you ever abandon them” — Saleh al-Jafarawi’s will
Marwa Yousuf K. is a writer exploring how politics and faith shape life in Occupied Kashmir and beyond, with contributions to local publications and community platforms.
