Alaa’ Saleh al-Tahrawi

Their life

Alaa' Saleh Abdul Mohsen al-Tahrawi (also identified as al-Mallahi), a 30-year-old Palestinian woman, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Rafah refugee camp during Israel's August 2022 military offensive on Gaza. Her death was particularly gruesome—rescue crews recovered her severely mutilated and dismembered body from the rubble of her destroyed apartment building, highlighting the horrific human toll of urban warfare.

Alaa' Saleh Abdul Mohsen al-Tahrawi (also recorded as al-Mallahi in some reports) was a 30-year-old Palestinian woman whose life was brutally cut short during Israel's military offensive on Gaza in August 2022. Born and raised in the densely populated Rafah Refugee Camp, Alaa' lived her entire life under the harsh realities of occupation, blockade, and recurring violence that have defined existence for generations of Gazans. The Rafah camp, originally established in 1949 to house Palestinians displaced during the Nakba, had grown into a cramped urban environment where extended families crowded into modest concrete homes and basic services were stretched to their limits.

As a woman in her thirties, Alaa' likely shouldered multiple responsibilities common to Palestinian women in Gaza - caring for family members, managing household needs amid chronic electricity and water shortages, and possibly contributing to the family income through informal work. Her daily life would have been shaped by the same challenges faced by all Gazan civilians: navigating Israeli-imposed movement restrictions, coping with unemployment rates exceeding 50%, and surviving amidst the constant threat of military escalation. The psychological toll of living under near-constant surveillance from Israeli drones overhead and the knowledge that war could erupt at any moment was an inescapable part of her reality.

Alaa's death came during Operation "Breaking Dawn," a three-day Israeli military campaign that claimed 49 Palestinian lives. On the night of August 6, 2022, without warning, Israeli warplanes fired six missiles at her residential building in Block L of Rafah camp, collapsing the three-story structure and killing seven civilians. The attack's ferocity was such that Alaa's body was recovered in a severely mutilated state, a testament to the devastating power of modern munitions used in densely populated urban areas. Israeli officials later admitted the strike targeted a militant commander, but provided no justification for the disproportionate civilian casualties.

How they died

Blunt-force trauma, blast injuries, and catastrophic bodily mutilation caused by an Israeli airstrike that destroyed her residential building in Rafah. Her remains were recovered dismembered from the rubble.

On August 6, 2022, at 21:30, Israeli warplanes fired six missiles at a residential building in Rafah without warning, collapsing the structure and damaging seven nearby homes. The attack allegedly targeted Khaled Mansour, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander, but the majority of victims were civilians, including Alaa’.

Why we remember them

This record exists so that Alaa’ Saleh al-Tahrawi, and all who are named in this archive, are never reduced to a number.

References & sources