Who is Yaqeen Hammad? Gaza’s Youngest Influencer Killed in Israeli Strike

"Is there anything more beautiful than the smile of Gaza’s children?"

Yaqeen Hammad asked in a caption of a video showing her handing out clothes and toys to families. The footage is from mid-May. She stands beside a distribution tent, surrounded by children, dancing, playing, and smiling. "I try to bring a bit of joy to the hearts of other children so that they can forget the war," she told viewers.

A week later, on May 23, 2025, Yaqeen was killed in an Israeli strike on al-Baraka, a neighbourhood in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. She was 11 years old. Palestinian health officials confirmed that she was among the dozens of people, including children, killed in the area that night.

Yaqeem’s Instagram account, @yaqeen_hmad, had amassed over 100,000 followers. Many labelled her ‘Gaza’s Youngest Influencer’. Her social media has become a record of what life looks like inside Gaza’s shelters. Her videos showed her distributing meals, dancing with children, and explaining how to cook using firewood when gas was unavailable. In one post, she pointed to bricks arranged in a fire pit and said, "Did they cut off the gas? We made gas! Gaza: No to the impossible." In her short life, she had already left a digital trail of resistance.

In a place where journalists are often blocked and narratives are controlled, Yaqeen was able to capture reality, without bitterness or spectacle. Her posts weren’t shaped by geopolitics or ideology. They were acts of presence: lessons on rationing, shots of laughter inside tents, and a kind of radical optimism that kept her smiling, even when surrounded by rubble.

Born in 2013, Yaqeen was the youngest of five siblings. She lived in Deir al-Balah, a city that has faced repeated bombardment since October 2023. Alongside her brother, Mohamed, she volunteered with the local Onena Collective, filming relief efforts. During Ramadan, she stood next to a communal pot and explained how to prepare iftar when gas ran out. “Today was a day of joy for Gaza’s orphans,” she wrote in Arabic. “We were giving them new clothes to bring a little happiness.”

Another post showed her leading children in makeshift classrooms. “We are still holding on to the Qur’an and education despite the famine, siege, and the continuation of genocide,” she wrote. “With empty stomachs and believing hearts, this is a message to the whole world.

News of her death spread across social media, and thousands took to her comments to share sentiments of grief, prayer and tribute.

"Her body may be gone, but her impact remains a beacon of humanity," wrote Gazan photojournalist Mahmoud Bassam. Others shared her videos, preserving fragments of the work she had done. One clip, viewed hundreds of thousands of times, showed her working to build wells during the height of the Israel-sanctioned water blockade.

The Cost of War In Gaza

In Gaza, the dead are often spoken of in numbers. Tens of thousands killed. Hundreds of thousands displaced. These figures roll across headlines with the cold efficiency of metrics, necessary for scale, but brutal in their abstraction. They obscure more than they reveal, and the individual vanishes into the cumulative. When coverage of Gaza defaults to numbers, it enables a kind of global indifference, even among those who profess outrage. There is comfort in counting: it dulls the specificity of loss and strips it of its humanity.

This is why stories like Yaqeen’s matter. Her social media page enabled her to share the stories of those in Gaza with the world, and in ways preserved them even in death. In the middle of collective trauma, Yaqeen insisted on human connection. She shared everyday life rendered extraordinary by the violence around it.

"We lost that smile, hers and other children's, that is the cost of the war in Gaza,” said one user in the comments of her last post.

Since October 2023, the enclave has seen waves of Israeli military operations with catastrophic civilian consequences. Children have died not just in bombings, but in hospitals without power, homes without food, shelters without clean water. Yaqeen’s death, for many, was the distillation of this cruelty.

Her Instagram account remains online. No new videos will come. But what she left behind still circulates. She documented not just the violence, but the will to endure it. Even in her death, she is able to remind those around her to stay resilient, to look for ways to bring joy to others even in the most challenging of circumstances. Through the noise, her words remain: “Gaza: no to the impossible.”