Maedeh Zaman Fashami, journalist and researcher
"Ghaith, you are your mother's heart and soul. I want you to promise me you won't cry for me, so that I can remain happy. I want you to make me proud, to become a brilliant and outstanding person, to reach your full potential and become a successful businessman. My dear, do not forget me. My love, everything I did was to see you happy and to keep you happy and at peace, and I endured all hardships for your sake. When you grow up, get married, and have a daughter, name her 'Maryam,' after me. You, my dear, are my heart, my support, my soul, and my son who makes me proud. Your existence always brings me joy.
I advise you, do not forget your prayers. My son, your prayers, your prayers.
Your mother, Maryam"
This will, this last message, is from Maryam Abu Daqqa to her only son. Maryam, the mother who wrote these words, is no longer among us. Yesterday, before the eyes of the entire world and on a live television broadcast of the Zionists' crime, she was martyred on the roof of the emergency building of the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, amidst the explosions and the rubble. Her camera was with her. She held no weapon in her hand; she was only documenting the truth. A truth the world does not want to see, but she could not remain silent.
Maryam's life became intertwined with war and destruction from the day she became a journalist. Starting in 2020, when she began working with professional news agencies, her every day was spent amidst ruined streets and hospitals filled with the wounded. She was not a desk journalist, nor someone who reported the news from a safe distance; she was among the people, amidst the smoke and rubble, in the heart of stories that perhaps no newspaper dared to print.
Maryam's Instagram page was filled with images that captured life and war simultaneously: a child holding onto his school notebook in the middle of the ruins, a woman waiting in a bread line, an ambulance speeding through dusty streets, and the martyrs ascending to the heavens. Her posts were not just pictures, but documents of resistance and hope in the midst of devastation. Every glance of hers into the camera, every photo and every video, was the voice of those who had been caught in the fire of oblivion.
She sent her son, Ghaith, to the Emirates to be safe, but she herself decided to stay in Gaza. Every day, wearing a bulletproof vest, camera in hand, she walked among the explosions and smoke. She knew she could lose her life at any moment, but she always said, "The camera is my weapon." And yesterday, that same weapon recorded the last moment of her life. Throughout this genocide, she covered the displacement, the hunger, the human stories, the ground incursions of the Zionist army, and the aerial bombardments, and she also recorded videos of the war. Maryam lost her home and her professional equipment in the war, but she never stopped documenting the events and the human narratives that the war left in its wake.
She worked tirelessly, in the field day and night. "I witnessed her unparalleled energy in media coverage. She was present in every corner and at every news event," said Tahseen al-Astal, Vice President of the Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate. During the war, Maryam's mother became gravely ill but could not find treatment in Gaza and was martyred in a hospital. This loss was incredibly heavy for Maryam, yet she continued her work. One of the most painful moments of her life was when she had to take pictures of the bodies of her fellow journalists who were martyred in the war. With each colleague lost, she would ask herself, "Will I be a victim like them, or will I survive this massacre?"
Every morning when Maryam woke up, the first thing she did was pick up her camera. Every moment was spent between documenting the truth and protecting herself, between the rubble and the sound of explosions. Every photo, every post, and every video was a note on the lives of her people, notes that she herself sometimes wrote in her Instagram captions: "Hope is the only thing that can keep us alive," or "Every picture I take is a testimony to a truth the world does not want to see."
Every day, she watched as her colleagues were martyred one by one, but she did not stop working. She knew that being a journalist meant standing against forgetting, meant recording the moments that others could not or would not see.
Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, 246 journalists have been martyred, a significant portion of whom are women journalists, brave women like Shireen Abu Akleh who previously gave their lives to document the truth. Maryam stood among this group and continued on the same path, until she was martyred on the roof of the Nasser emergency building, under two successive explosions.
In Gaza, hospitals, which should be sanctuaries, have become bases for journalists. Hind, an Al Jazeera journalist, says: "We are in a two-year war without electricity and internet. Palestinian journalists have made hospitals their base to continue reporting; about the wounded, the hungry, and the lifeless bodies." Maryam was part of this relentless effort.
The Zionist regime has repeatedly targeted hospitals and media centers and has provided no evidence for its claims based on which it targets journalists. According to the Geneva Conventions, journalists are civilians, and targeting them is a war crime. Of course, a war crime is a daily routine for a regime that has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians, more than half of whom are women and children, and has seen no appropriate response from the world.
On August 24, 2025, Imam Khamenei described the regime's crimes as such: "In my estimation, the crimes being committed today by the leaders of the Zionist regime are unprecedented in history."
In no contemporary war have so many journalists been killed. And, of course, in none have hospitals and medical centers been bombed to this extent. Maryam Abu Daqqa was a journalist who was martyred in the bombing of a hospital, and this single line best reveals the reality of the Zionist crimes in Gaza.
Maryam was martyred yesterday, but her voice still remains. In her pictures, in her videos, in the Instagram posts she published from the days of the war, in every photo, a moment of courage and steadfastness is still alive. She narrated life amidst the ruins, and in her last writing, seven days before her martyrdom, she left a sentence for all of us to remember:
"In this life, we are passersby, we pass like a cloud that passes, and we own nothing but our deeds."
(The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Khamenei.ir.)
