The Gaza family torn apart by IDF snipers from Chicago [USA] and Munich [Germany]- Five-month investigation reveals how four members of one family were shot and killed in a single day and highlights a pattern in which Israeli troops target unarmed civilians

The names of survivors and witnesses have been changed due to security concerns 

Palestinians walk amid the rubble of destroyed buildings in Gaza City’s Tal al-Hawa district on 26 November 2023, on the third day of a truce between Israel and Hamas. Photograph: Omar El-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images

Hoda Osman and Emma Graham-Harrison

Tue 9 Sep 2025 11.50 EDT

Last modified on Tue 9 Sep 2025 17.21 EDT

Daniel Raab shows no hesitation as he watches footage of 19-year-old Salem Doghmosh crumpling to the ground beside his brother in a street in northern Gaza.

“That was my first elimination,” he says. The video, shot by a drone, lasts just a few seconds. The Palestinian teenager appears to be unarmed when he is shot in the head.

Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, concedes he knew that. He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed.

“It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”

A five-month investigation by the Guardian, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) and Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel and ZDF has identified six people shot by Israeli snipers on 22 November 2023. And through interviews with survivors, witnesses and relatives, reviews of death certificates, medical records and geolocated images we revealed how a family from Gaza City’s Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood was torn apart in a few hours by men who grew up in Naperville, Illinois and Munich, Germany.

Israeli snipers killed four members of the Doghmosh family that day, and injured two others. Their story illuminates patterns of killing by Israeli troops, who have repeatedly treated unarmed men between 18 and 40 in Gaza as targets.... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-family-torn-apart-by-idf-snipers-from-chicago-and-munich

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

Raab and Graetz’s location has been traced from photos and videos taken by Israeli soldiers showing the two snipers aiming their weapons through a window and a hole in the wall.  PHOTO

Footage from inside shows graffiti with devil horns, the squad’s unofficial logo.  VIDEO

Family members say they recognised Salem Doghmosh, who was shot dead as he tried to retrieve the body of his brother Mohammed. PHOTO

Youssef says he recognises himself, walking with his hands in his pockets beside Mohammed moments before he was shot dead. PHOTO

Witnesses including family members say this footage shows Mohammed Farid moments before he was shot dead PHOTO

SEE and SHARE: Zionists objecting to the Palestine Flag & a sign for CEASEFIRE break the display window of Women and Children First Bookstore in Chicago this week

Mosab Abu Toha This happened to Women and Children First Bookstore in Chicago.  My poetry book was featured along with other important books.   See and share.

photos from social media

 

Window displaying Palestinian flag, sign for ceasefire damaged at bookstore on Chicago's North Side  

Chicago police said an unknown number of people broke the window – classifying it as criminal damage to property.

No injuries were reported.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, the store said the window displayed a Palestinian flag with a sign calling for a ceasefire. 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/window-displaying-palestinian-flag-sign-for-ceasefire-damaged-at-bookstore-on-chicagos-north-side/ar-AA1nBSBI

Oh shining star testify: "Often reflecting on ideas of amnesia, erasure, and return within the Palestinian condition, the artists see these artworks as potential tools for the politically oppressed to become unbound from colonial systems."

 As always, please go to the orginal link to read the article in full- and help make it more popular if you can.  Every little bit helps:  https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9712/if-only-this-mountain-between-us-could-be-ground-to-dust?fbclid=IwAR38jO9i4PjL91jiPp8GjOelmpoZ9rtcaaeaWu0U_cvscYBip3rJR-KpLfw

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Oh shining star testify, 2019

Installation view at Art Institute of Chicago, 2021

If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust

Jul 31, 2021–Jan 3, 2022

If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust—the first exhibition by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in a major US museum—combines a site-specific installation of the artists’ ongoing multimedia projects with a commissioned work created specifically for the Art Institute of Chicago.

Working in film, installation, performance, sound, and text, Abbas and Abou-Rahme sample self-authored and existing media and materials to reframe and activate narratives that they describe as everyday erasures of Palestinian experience as a means of resisting the illusion of one immutable history. The interconnected works in this installation critically examine how bodies, images, language, memories, and narratives exist within contemporary archives, media, and institutions. Often reflecting on ideas of amnesia, erasure, and return within the Palestinian condition, the artists see these artworks as potential tools for the politically oppressed to become unbound from colonial systems.

Central to the exhibition is an immersive multimedia installation combining new versions of two multi-channel video works. Oh shining star testify (2019–21) focuses on CCTV footage taken from a surveillance camera that circulated online after Yusuf ­Shawamreh, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy, was killed by Israeli forces. The layered footage, sampled from recordings of the event, brings attention to how images that circulate online can offer a testament to historic events, though that testament can be obliterated when the internet becomes oversaturated with imagery. Foregrounding the simultaneous accumulation and disappearance of data and images, the artists make visible how those “uncounted bodies counter their own erasures, appearing on a street, on a link or on a feed.”  

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other, 2019

Installation view at Art Institute of Chicago, 2021

The second video, At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (2019–21), uses fragments of Palestinian postcolonial scholar Edward Said’s poem “After the Last Sky” to interrogate what it means to be constructed as an “illegal” person, body, or entity. The text fragments are interspersed with human avatars created from images of demonstrators in the Great March of Return, a series of protests that began in 2018 and advocated for ending a 12-year blockade and returning Palestinians to their ancestral homeland. The avatars, which are rendered with software that represents missing data as glitches, scars, and incomplete facial features, seem to exist between the past and the future. 

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Once an artist, now just a tool, 2021   

The exhibition also presents for the first time the series of prints Don’t read poetics in these lines (2010–21). Abbas and Abou-Rahme began producing this work in 2010 by screenshotting and archiving tweets that responded and continue to respond to the Arab revolutions. The selectively erased texts distill the rapid-fire reactions that unfolded on social media, thus standing as a testament to our time and offering a physical counterweight to the internet, which the artists consider an “amnesiac archive.”

Extracted from this archive, Once an artist, now just a tool (2021) was commissioned by the Art Institute and critiques how museums perpetuate the legacies of the colonial apparatus. In repositioning these sampled fragments, the artists assert language’s capacity to challenge systems and histories of power, critically pointing to the shifts that occur between events and discourse. 

The exhibition’s visceral and material narratives raise timely and urgent questions about the ways history is constructed and continually obliterated—encouraging viewers to imagine the potential futures that emerge from the immersive sonic and visual environment.

If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust is curated by Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Associate Curator, Architecture and Design.

ART INSTITUTE of CHICAGO