Cypriot Palestinian journalist Yahia Barzaq was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, local media confirmed on Wednesday night.

Barzaq worked as a freelance journalist in the strip, with his most notable work coming for Turkish public broadcaster TRT, where he produced a documentary called Gaza Through My Lens, alongside creative portraits of newborn Gazan children.

He was married and a father of two.

The strike which killed him was launched on Tuesday evening by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) at the town of Deir al-Balah, where, according to TRT, Barzaq was “on assignment documenting the war’s impact on civilians”.

It added that the cafe in which he was working was hit by a missile, with local media reporting that four others were killed in the same strike.

In the days leading up to his death, Barzaq had contacted Cypriot news website Bugun Kibris to report on the increasingly desperate situation in the strip and his upset at Israel’s orders to evacuate southwards.

“I swear to you, I speak with my hands shaking with anger. All the places being threatened are now residential areas. The occupying forces have started dropping leaflets telling us to go south, but I do not want to go south. I do not want to live on the street, in a tent. I have already lived through a year and a half of displacement. I do not want to go through that nightmare again now,” he said.

He later added that “even if I go, we will not be able to live safely in a tent on the street”, and that “the place to which they want us to go is constantly being bombed”.

“My wife’s family, her elderly parents, all her aunts, all over 80 years old, are with us. My brother and his mother-in-law are in the same area. They are also elderly and injured. It is so crowded that we cannot think straight … We are exhausted, living in a complete nightmare,” he said.

Many Cypriots in Palestine are the descendants of Turkish Cypriot women who were married off to men in British Palestine in the early part of the 20th century, with this practice continuing until the 1950s.

Author Neriman Cahit wrote in 2014 that as many as 4,000 Turkish Cypriot women were sent to Palestine to be married to Arab men.

At the outset of the current conflict in Gaza in 2023, Turkey’s then deputy foreign minister and current permanent representative at the United Nations Ahmet Yildiz said that there were 104 Turkish Cypriots inside Gaza waiting to be evacuated to Turkey.

At the same time, the north’s ‘foreign ministry’ had said that 150 Turkish Cypriots and their relatives had been successfully evacuated from Israel and Palestine within 12 days of the start of the conflict on October 7, 2023.