Enter one name into a nine-month record, because the record has grown too large to read without one.
Mohammed al-Wahidi was 57, the public relations director of the Egyptian Relief Committee in Gaza, and his specialty within the aid operation was a particular kind of relief: screens. He put them up in the displacement camps so families in tents could watch the World Cup - in his son Fawaz's words to Reuters, he 'tried to bring them the matches close to their tents and wrecked shelters' [1]. Ninety minutes of somewhere else, aired into a place nobody can leave.
On July 8, the eve of Egypt's match against Argentina, an Israeli strike hit the taxi carrying him through Gaza City's Sabra neighborhood. It killed him; it killed two siblings, aged 10 and 8; it killed Ahmed Jehad Rajab Doghmosh, 30 [1]. Gaza buried him while the tournament his screens were raised for played on toward its semifinals.
The ledger he joins, per Gaza's health ministry: 1,092 people killed and more than 3,500 wounded in the nine months since the ceasefire took effect on October 10 [1] - roughly four deaths a day, every day, inside an arrangement the world's diplomatic vocabulary still calls a ceasefire. He is the second aid worker on this week's page alone; the World Central Kitchen driver killed delivering food from the Karem Abu Salem crossing died the same day [1]. We reported this week on the pilot humanitarian zone being designed for Gaza's future; the present tense of humanitarian work there is a man in a taxi, and the taxi is not safe.
The record states, and the record is the point. No claim is rated here; the ministry's count is attributed as the ministry's; Israel's military did not comment in the reporting at hand [1]. What the docket preserves is smaller and harder than a verdict: a name, an age, a job that consisted of making the unlivable briefly worth watching, and a date - the night before Egypt played - on which the count reached him. Whoever finally audits these nine months will need the names to have been kept. This one is kept.
