In Gaza, where death lurks even for those who tell the story, fate has written a new chapter of loss. However, this time it did not steal just a journalist, it took half a life, and a love that lived long between the camera and the pen. Meet journalists Hala Asfour and Muhammad Salama.

Hala Asfour and Muhammad Salama: a meeting not by chance

Journalists Hala Asfour and Muhammad Salama did not meet by chance. First, their profession brought them together, then their hearts. They moved together through the destroyed alleys of Gaza, Mohammed’s camera intersecting with Hala’s pen, documenting together the stories of hungry children, steadfast women, and houses that collapsed on their inhabitants. Their coverage was not just work; it was a love story set against the backdrop of war, with each supporting the other and finishing each other’s sentences.

Mohammed once said to Hala:

As long as we are together, death cannot defeat us.

But Israel’s bombing of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis took them both by surprise, killing Mohammed before her eyes, while she remained alive, carrying a pain beyond her capacity to bear.

With his passing, Hala lost not only a colleague, but also her lover, companion, and partner in battles big and small. She used to watch him run with his camera among the rubble, never imagining that the rubble itself would witness his assassination.

Walking alone

Today, Hala Asfour walks alone. She returns to the field without Muhammad Salama by her side, without the hand that used to hold hers when fear intensified, without the shoulder she used to lean on when the stories of the victims weighed heavily on her. She struggles with life and her profession at the same time, carrying the camera in her hand and writing with her broken heart, as if she were communicating about him and herself together.

Their story was not just a love story between a man and a woman, but a love that brought together reality and dreams, profession and mission, courage and human weakness. But the war did not give them the chance to fulfill this love; it buried it with Muhammad under the rubble, leaving Hala to live half a life searching for the other half in her memory.

In Gaza, hearts are assassinated before they can confess their dreams. In the story of Hala and Muhammad, a rare love story was assassinated, written by the camera and recorded by the pen, but it ended with the impact of a missile that extinguished the light and left only an echo.

In every minute of Gaza’s silence, a person passes away, leaving behind family, friends, and unfinished stories. But Hala and Muhammad’s story tells the world that this war does not only kill bodies, it kills love itself, and buries dreams before they even begin.

The painful question remains: Who will heal the bitterness of a love cut in half, and who will bring back to life a heart buried with its owner under the rubble?

Featured image via the Canary