An elderly Palestinian woman, who had previously gone viral for saying she was “older than Israel” in a video circulating online, was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in Gaza, Al Arabiya reported on Friday, citing a local photographer.
Hadia Nasr was born in 1944, four years before the ‘Nakba,’ the Arabic word for catastrophe that refers to the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation and the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The woman stole the hearts of hundreds online after appearing in a video posted by Palestinian journalist Saleh al-Jaafrawi, who visited her while she was in a hospital recovering after being wounded in an Israeli airstrike.
In the video, al-Jaafrawi stumbles upon her date of birth while looking through her official documents and confirms that she was born prior to Israel’s creation.
The two are also seen laughing after the young man jokingly flirts with the Palestinian woman.
After recovering from her injuries, the elderly woman reportedly refused calls to forcibly evacuate her neighborhood and returned to her home.
She was shot dead outside her front door, according to a conversation screenshot shared in an Al Arabiya social media video.
Israel has continued to press on with its offensive in and around Gaza’s main cities, with the death toll in the territory soaring above 17,000.
More than 80 percent of Gaza’s population – about 1.9 million of its 2.3 million residents – have been internally displaced so far as Israel reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble, according to UN data.
