Gazans killed by Israel are not numbers, they had dreams too
2 min read
Our martyrs are not just numbers... they are real people, with real lives and real stories.
As Israel continues to brutally bombard Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Not Numbers is working hard to bring a humane side to the ever-rising death toll — which has reached over 9,000 people.
The Facebook page's mission is to do more than just provide a running total of dead Palestinians, as major news outlets often seem to do.
Instead, Not Numbers attempts to provide a rich portrait of the lives, hopes, and dreams of Gazans killed by Israel.
"The initiative adds a human dimension to the morbid statistics"
The founder of the group, Aya Soufa, a Palestinian based in Scotland, told The New Arab that she aimed to create a database that includes the names of people killed, in addition to details about their lives.
"Our aim was to make an open-source database that can be used by anyone who needs more information about the people who were killed in Gaza recently," Aya explained.
Not Numbers asks members to add pictures of those who were killed, as well as descriptions about who they were as people and more about their lives.
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, Israel has killed more than 8,796 victims, including 3,648 children, with numbers increasing. Earlier last week, US President Joe Biden had said that he did not trust the number of casualties coming out of Gaza. In response, the Ministry of Health later issued a PDF file with the names of all the people killed, their ID numbers, and their ages.
Aya's group is one of the many Palestinian initiatives that aim to fight this rampant dehumanisation of Palestinians in the media and politics today and is another notable initiative that has been working to preserve Palestinian humanity for years.
Below, The New Arab has profiled some of the people mentioned in the group.
![Basel Khayyat (right side of the photo): Based was killed with his wife and their four children and their cat on the 13 October when Israeli warplanes hit their home in Rafah, located in the southern part of the Gaza strip - the are designated as 'safe' by the Israeli army. Basel was an engineer, while his wife was a physics teacher [photo credit: Not Numbers/Facebook]](/sites/default/files/styles/large_16_9/public/2023-11/Screenshot%202023-11-01%20123936.png?h=a553ef89&itok=6k_pkMw8)
the Gaza Strip — an area that was designated as 'safe' by Israeli forces.
Basel was an engineer, while his wife was a physics teacher [Not Numbers/Facebook]
[Not Numbers/Facebook]
[Not Numbers/Facebook]
[Not Numbers/Facebook]
![Heba Abu Nada: Novelist and writer Heba was killed on the 20th of October after the Israeli warplanes targeted the house she sheltered at in Khan Younis at the southern Gaza Strip, she was 31 when she was killed. She wrote her last words on Facebook: "To God, we in Gaza are either martyrs or witnesses to liberation, and we all wait to see where we will be. We are all awaiting, oh God, your true promise," Abu Nada wrote on 20 October, the day she was killed [photo credit: Not Numbers/Facebook]](/sites/default/files/2023-11/Screenshot%202023-11-01%20130022.png)
Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, she was 31.
Her last words on Facebook posted on October 20 were:
"To God, we in Gaza are either martyrs or witnesses to liberation, and we all wait to see where we will be. We are all awaiting, oh God, your true promise," [Not Numbers/Facebook]
Abeer Ayyoub is a freelance journalist based in Amman
Follow her on Twitter: @abeerayyoub
