Roller skating girl killed by Israeli strike in Gaza

A Palestinian girl, 10-year-old Tala Hussam Abu Ajiwa, was killed in an Israeli strike while playing outside their Gaza home in her roller skates, her dad told NBC News.

Warning: This article contains graphic imagery.

Tala Hussam Abu Ajiwa wanted to go outside and play on her pink rollerblades.

At first Tala’s father, Hussam Abu Ajiwa, told his 10-year-old daughter that she couldn’t. But she “insisted and begged,” and like many parents, he and his wife relented despite their fears about the frequent blasts and gunfire around their home in Gaza City.

“She went downstairs to play. To enjoy playing as the rest of the world’s children do,” Abu Ajiwa told an NBC News crew on the ground Thursday.

A framed photo of Tala Hussam Abu Ajiwa, 10, on a dressing table in her bedroom. NBC NewsBut moments later he heard two “mighty explosions,” sending him running outside where he found his daughter lying beneath a pile of rubble, her feet clad in the rollerblades that she had hoped would afford her a brief moment of escape from a war that had come to dominate her young life.It was the image of those rollerblades, with their white velcro straps and line of powder pink wheels poking out of the white cloth covering Tala’s body, that circulated widely on social media this week.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/roller-skating-girl-killed-israeli-strike-gaza-rcna169885

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