'Marked for death' The day snipers tore one Gaza family's world apart

Daniel Raab shows no hesitation as he watches footage of 19-year-old Salem Doghmosh crumpling to the ground beside his brother in a north Gaza street. "That was my first elimination," he says. The video, shot by a drone, lasts a few seconds.

- Hoda Osman Emma Graham-Harrison

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), Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel and ZDF has identified six people shot by Israeli snipers on 22 November 2023. Through interviews with survivors, witnesses and relatives, reviews of death certificates, medical records and geolocated images, we have 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, on the outskirts of Chicago, and Munich, in 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. The mass slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians is one factor cited by scholars, lawyers and rights groups who say Israel is committing genocide.

"They're thinking: 'Oh I don't think [I'll get shot] because I'm wearing civilian clothes and I am not carrying a weapon and all that, but they were wrong,' said Raab, who majored in biology at the University of Illinois before joining the Israel Defense Forces. "That's what you have snipers for."

After Salem was shot, his father, Montasser, 51, rushed to the site and tried to collect his sons' bodies for burial, but was also fatally injured by a sniper.