via APNews (Associated Press):

RiP: 19-year-old #Palestinian TikTok star Medo Halimy began making his "tent life" video series when he took refuge with his family earlier this year in a strip of southern Gaza that Israel has designated a humanitarian safe zone.

Turning his camera on the intimate details of his own life in Gaza, he reached viewers far and wide, documenting life's mundane absurdities and revealing a maddening tedium that's largely left out of news coverage about the war.

"If you wonder what living in a tent is actually like, come with me to show you how I spend my day," Halimy says in his first of many "tent life" diaries filmed from the sprawling encampment.

He filmed himself going about his day: waiting restlessly in long lines for drinking water, showering with a jar and a bucket ("there's no shampoo or soap, of course"), scavenging ingredients to make a surprisingly tasty baba ganoush, the Middle East's smoky eggplant dip ("Mama mia!" he marvels at his creation), and becoming very, very bored ("then I went back to the tent, and did nothing").

Even when recounting tragedies (his grandmother died, he mentioned at one point, largely because of Gaza's acute medication and equipment shortages) or fretting over Israel's bombardment, Halimy's friends said that he found salve in channeling his grief and anxiety into deadpan humor.

"Very annoying," he says with an eye roll when the buzz of an Israeli drone interrupts one of his TikTok recipe videos.

"As you can see, the transportation here is not five stars," he says when crammed between men in a pickup truck heading to the nearby town of Deir al-Balah.

"We proceeded to play, anyway," he says of his Monopoly game, when the whooshing of Israeli projectiles sounds in the skies above him and his friends. "Anyway, I lost."

Halimy produced diaries that captivated hundreds of thousands of viewers curious about what life looks like amid war. His videos went viral — some amassing more than 2 million views on TikTok.

While hanging out with a close friend and collaborator at the local internet cafe, a tent with Wi-Fi where displaced Palestinians can connect to the outside world, Halimy was killed by shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike.

Tributes to Halimy poured in from friends as far afield as Harker Heights, Texas, where he spent a year in 2021 as part of an exchange program sponsored by the State Department.

Israel's campaign in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians. It has also transformed legions of ordinary teenagers, who have nothing to do every day but survive, into war correspondents for the social media age.

The Israeli military said it was not aware of the strike that killed Halimy.