Israeli forces shot 84-year-old Christian music teacher Elham Farah in the leg as she left a church shelter to check on her home, then left her bleeding in the street for hours before a tank drove over her body, according to family members and eyewitness accounts that describe the incident as a clear war crime.
Farah, a beloved pianist and longtime music educator who played for Gaza’s Baptist congregation and came from one of the territory’s oldest Christian families, had been sheltering at the Holy Family Catholic Church compound when she ventured out.
Witnesses say an IDF sniper opened fire without warning, striking her in the leg just meters from her apartment in Gaza City’s al-Rimal neighborhood.
Unable to move and crying out in pain, Farah lay helpless as Israeli troops prevented any rescue attempts by firing on those who tried to reach her.
She remained in the street overnight, her final phone calls to relatives capturing her suffering: “I can’t feel my legs… I can’t move.”
By the following morning, she had bled to death. Family and local accounts state that an Israeli tank then deliberately rolled over her corpse — with some relatives asserting she was still alive when the vehicle crushed her.
This brutal sequence — shooting an unarmed elderly civilian, denying her medical aid, and desecrating her body with armored machinery — exemplifies the pattern of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence that has characterized much of the IDF’s campaign in Gaza.
Critics, including human rights observers and church leaders, have labeled such actions as potential war crimes under international humanitarian law, which explicitly prohibits targeting non-combatants, failing to assist the wounded, and mutilating the dead.
The incident drew condemnation from the Pope, who described the killings of Palestinian Christians in Gaza as “terrorism.”
Yet the Israeli military has offered no detailed explanation or accountability for Farah’s death, consistent with its broader refusal to investigate numerous similar cases involving civilians, medical workers, and places of worship.