Yousef Aljamal
Writer and human rights worker

By KELLY MYERS
Los Alamos

This past summer, our community’s Free Palestine Summer Series brought diverse speakers to Los Alamos. One of the presenters was Dr. Yousef Aljamal, a writer, human rights worker, and refugee from Gaza, who joined us remotely.

Today, we share an update about our friend, Yousef, not as an expert speaker, but as a heartbroken brother and uncle. On Sept. 27, while living in exile in Turkey, he woke to the news that an Israeli missile had struck his family home in Gaza. The strike killed nine of his immediate family members as they slept. Among the dead were his brother Abood, Abood’s wife Sarah, and their young daughters Huda and Zainab; his sister Ghalia, her husband Yousef, and their daughters Mariam and Zainab; and his brother-in-law, Dr. Khaled, a dedicated pediatrician. His sister Mariam and her children were pulled injured from the rubble.

In a haunting article, titled “Overnight, an Israeli strike turned my family’s home in Gaza into a graveyard,” published on Dec. 1, 2025, Yousef describes the suffocating guilt of surviving. He recounts how, the night before the strike, his sister had sent him a list of 24 family members hoping for evacuation—a hope obliterated by dawn. He details the unbearable task of identifying loved ones from scattered remains and the surreal agony of his surviving family now repairing their shattered home to live in, because “it is better than living in a tent.”

This is not a distant political abstraction. It is the intimate, shattering reality for a man who shared his story with us just months ago. Since the war began, Yousef has now lost 16 immediate family members. He writes, “It feels as though those who were killed are the real survivors, while the rest of us … carry an unending, overwhelming pain.”

This holiday season, as we reflect on peace and the story of a child born in Bethlehem, we are called to remember that the land where Christ was born is now a landscape of profound grief for families like Yousef’s. Their home, once full of siblings and grandchildren, is now a graveyard.

We urge you to read Yousef Yousef’s first-person account. It is a poignant and necessary testament to the human cost of war.

His voice, which once reached us in a spirit of education and solidarity, now carries a weight of unimaginable sorrow. It is a real and urgent call for our attention, empathy, and action.

Here is the link to Yousef’s article: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/overnight-israeli-strike-turned-my-familys-home-gaza-graveyard.