22nd November, 2023
By Victoria Oluwayemi
Dima Alhaj, a 29-year-old staff of the World Health Organization, WHO, has been killed in Gaza, the occupied Palestinian territory, during the ongoing war.
The WHO officially confirmed this in a press release on Tuesday evening.
Alhaj died on Tuesday when her parents’ house in southern Gaza — where she had evacuated from Gaza City—was bombed.
She was killed alongside her husband, their six-month-old baby boy, and her two brothers.
According to reports from the WHO, over 50 relatives and community members who were taking shelter in the same house also perished in the attack.
Alhaj held the role of a patient administrator at the Limb Reconstruction Centre, a crucial division of the WHO Trauma and Emergency Team.
She held a bachelor’s degree in Environmental and Earth Sciences from the Islamic University of Gaza and pursued further studies focusing on environmental health.
Her academic journey included a period as a master’s student at Glasgow University in Scotland, UK, as part of the Erasmus exchange program from 2018-2019.
The WHO representative in the occupied Palestinian territory, Dr Rik Peeperkorn, said:
“She was a wonderful person with a radiant smile, cheerful, positive, respectful. She was a true team player. Her work was crucial, and she had been requested to take on even more responsibilities to support the Gaza suboffice and team. This is such a painful loss for all of us. We share our deepest condolences with her mother and father (a long-serving medical specialist in Gaza), her family, and her many friends.
“The death of Dima and her family is another example of the senseless loss in this conflict. Civilians have died in their homes, at their workplaces, while evacuating, while sheltering in schools, while being cared for in hospitals.
“We plead again with all those who hold in their hands the power to end this conflict to do so.
“All of the WHO stands alongside Dima’s family and colleagues in the occupied Palestinian territory, the Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, and across the organization to mourn her loss.”