Gaza Family Says Israeli Gunfire Killed 8-Year-Old Girl Playing Outside Grandmother's Home

Fatima al-Bayouk had just finished her homework and gone out to play with her cousins outside her grandmother's house in Deir al-Balah when a bullet struck her neck, according to her family. She ran home bleeding, screaming that a cousin had been hit, not realizing the wound was her own. The bullet had lodged in her lung. She died a week later in hospital.

Her grandmother, Safia Abo Amra, told Middle East Eye that Fatima was the sole survivor of an Israeli air strike that killed the rest of her immediate family in Khan Younis on December 13, 2023. Abo Amra took the child in and raised her in Deir al-Balah for the two years that followed.

"My life was attached to Fatima's. I wish I could die after her."

Abo Amra said she had kept Fatima out of a UN-run school after hearing that Israeli stray fire reached the area regularly, paying instead for a local school and walking her there herself. Six months before Fatima was killed, her uncle Masoud Abo Amra, who had a mental disability, was shot in the neck while visiting relatives in Khan Younis, according to another uncle, Ahmad Abo Amra.

Middle East Eye has not independently verified the shooting or the earlier strike beyond the family's accounts; no hospital or military record is cited in the reporting.

The outlet frames Fatima's death as part of a broader pattern of Israeli gunfire striking displaced Palestinians near the so-called Yellow Line, the demarcation inside Gaza that has expanded under Israeli military control since the October 2025 ceasefire. It cites shooting from military positions, tanks and quadcopter drones as having killed and wounded "hundreds" of civilians in that period. That figure is not attributed to a named study, UN body or casualty count, and Occupation Watch has not independently confirmed it.

A second family interviewed by Middle East Eye, that of 19-year-old Zaid al-Kafarna, described near-daily gunfire in Um Duhair, south of Deir al-Balah, where his family of ten relocated just before the ceasefire after being displaced from northern Gaza. He said the shooting has made routine movement, including reaching food distribution points, dangerous.

The Israeli military has not been quoted responding to the specific incidents described in the reporting.