Where do you think Ibrahim’s head went? What would you tell the rescue workers looking for it right in this moment? Do you need clues? Does a head belonging to a good person calculate specific itineraries after evil severs it from his torso?

Here’s what we know about Ibrahim, the headless.

He was 24 years old. Before October 7th he ran a small tea house with his parents. He was their only child. Too many complications during his birth had made it too risky for his mum to have more. He got separated from his parents in November 2023 when the IDF herded them south. They might be alive, they might not be. He spent some time in Rafah looking for them, but lost all trace of them. He prayed every day they had made it into Egypt where his mum has an older sister.

He lived on rice, occasional scraps of chicken, unripe apricots (mishmish), lentils, some fish, American peanut butter with rock hard crackers from hard to come by aid packages and smiles. A lot of smiles. For 2 years and four months Ibrahim wandered through the Gaza ruins snapping pictures of children. At first he shot the injured ones. The ones grabbing their throats after schrapnel had torn their flesh apart. The ones crawling through rubble with shattered legs. The ones they had to tear off of their dead mums, blood streaming down their faces mixed with tears, because they didn’t want to let go. And didn’t know death was forever, unlike sleep.

But everyone was already doing that. Who would capture the invincibility of people whose cause is just, not via their gushing blood, but via their gushing joy?

Giggling children as they play ‘medic and bomb victim’. Smiles and warrior like focus as they play soccer in a mock Portugal versus Argentina match. Using unhinged doors from destroyed houses as goals.

The elation of about 70 little ones on a rare day someone managed to whip up pancakes for the neighbourhood. With exactly one strawberry for each of them. Have you ever seen the pinnacle of smiles?

You would have if you had found Ibrahim’s Instagram account. But it was blocked for mysterious reasons a week ago and nobody knows the password and Ibrahim’s phone looks like the upper part of his body: cracked.

So his pictures are lost. Swirling somewhere in the archive sludge of the internet. Technically retrievable, but it will of course never happen.

The other place where those pictures existed was in Ibrahim’s head. And that is lost too. In the debris sludge of Gaza.

A rescue worker asks: ‘What if it just exploded into mush like a water melon?’

His friend disagrees: ‘We would have found something then. Hair. Skull fragments.’

They try to reconstruct how it happened.

Ibrahim was standing in the middle of an improvised dirt road in the tent camp.

Three kids going from tent to tent collecting laundry in a wheelbarrow for some makeshift laundromat at the edge of the tent camp had caught his attention. He had told a friend that morning: ‘I want to catch them unawares. I can’t make them stop doing boring old influencer poses when they know am taking their picture.’

When the artillery shell hit Ibrahim got knocked over. It directly struck a rack of pots and pans everyone in the camp shares freely for cooking standing by the side of the road.

Pieces of pots and pans used to fry what little food was available in precious olive oil cut up Ibrahim badly. A piece of a large frying pan with the handle on was stuck in his shoulder. Like the shell had gone straight through the rack and had blown the contents of a large kitchen through Ibrahim’s body.

Did his head end up in a cooking pot?

Nobody dared say it out loud. But half a dozen people took a close look at any pots strewn about without drawing attention to themselves.

Nobody else got killed. This time. Lobbing a lone artillery shell into the camp happened three, four times a week. IDF soldiers get bored. Or someone wants to feel powerful. Or it’s a strategy from the top down to make everyone permanently afraid. Someone mused if it was something they made every newcomer to the unit do to show his loyalty to the Israeli cause.

Three years ago you could still think that they were targetting a Hamas member. Three years of random killings made that options the least likely one by far.

The volunteer rescue workers and some of the tent dwellers continued searching for Ibrahim’s curly head for another two hours. Then they gave up.

They all felt badly about putting him into the ground, in a white shroud. Headless. Torso pierced countless times. Legs intact, but broken in several places. One arm hanging on only by a thread.

One of the children collecting laundry had to have all fingers but his thumb amputated. The only other casualty. They used only sleeping pills for the operation, so the kid didn’t really lose consciousness fully and mumbled:

‘It’s in the water tank.’

The doctor, an energetic lady from Lithuania didn’t understand Arabic, and the nurses were too tired to pay attention.

Towering above the tent camp is a huge plastic bassin on wooden poles to collect rain water. High up to keep it away from animals. Every day the tent people siphon off about 200 liter, boil it and distribute it.

The tent people don’t know it, but it’s what the IDF artillerists keep aiming at.

If they knew it contained the head of one of their victims, and who it belonged to, they’d never try to hit again.

They would find it too funny.

The people they loathe so very much drinking water with the vague aroma of the head of a young man. A young man with the drive they hate the most in Palestinians: to keep celebrating life in the face of an enemy that is trying to convince them that life is no longer worth living.

A young man so stubbornly dumb he thought he could preserve moments of joy in a place the artillerists did their very best to turn into a place where only despair, collapse and suicidal thoughts are supposed to reign.

The boy with the four lost fingers drifted in and out of sleep for several days. He kept seeing Ibrahim’s head shoot up into the water tank. The last thing the boy saw before he hit the ground himself.

The throbbing pain in his hand kept him from articulating it.

Until the three second flash memory was drowned out by the anguish of never again being able to push the wheelbarrow with the laundry with his two hands.

He too sipped the water.