Yousef Aljamal
+972 Magazine / August 14, 2024
Making tents out of aid parachutes, waiting days for a tin of beans, re-digging graves to bury more martyrs: here’s what Palestinians have to overcome.
Since October 7, my life has been split between two parallel realms. In the first, I go about my daily life as usual here in Turkey, where I work, visit my friends, do my routine shopping, and take care of my immediate family. In the second realm, I am immersed in the daily reports of the death, destruction, displacement, and fear that my family, friends, and neighbors are enduring in Gaza, and try to help them as much as possible.
My family in Gaza count themselves among the lucky ones: they have a roof over their heads. Thirty-five of my relatives are currently sharing my parents’ overcrowded house in Nuseirat refugee camp, in the center of the Gaza Strip. In January, they were temporarily displaced when Israel issued evacuation orders and sent tanks into the camp, but they subsequently managed to return.
With around 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents displaced and living in makeshift tents, ill-equipped displacement centers, or on the streets, my family are better off than most. Yet they still face severe hardships and indignities every day, forced to drink polluted water and search for food and cooking supplies. This is what the daily struggle for survival looks like inside the besieged and bombarded Gaza Strip.
Queuing for days for two tins of beans
Since October, Israel’s “total siege” on Gaza has led to full-blown famine throughout the Strip. Humanitarian aid has been held up at entry points, and the little that has entered has been vastly inadequate. Israel’s destruction and takeover of the Rafah Crossing in May — through which most aid had been entering — has made the situation even more disastrous.
The U.S.-built pier off the coast of Gaza also proved ineffective, delivering only a fraction of what trucks can bring in before being dismantled after 25 days. Airdrops have done more harm than good, falling on Palestinian homes and tents and even killing several people.
In order to receive what limited aid is available, residents must stand in line for long periods; in some cases, friends have queued for days to get two tins of beans and some biscuits. What’s more, because Israel has routinely obstructed the entry of aid, residents have been getting ill from eating canned meats that expired while being held up for weeks at the Egyptian side of the Rafah Crossing. “Even the cats refused to eat that meat,” Abdullah Eid, my 27-year-old neighbor from Nuseirat, told me.
When aid shipments are distributed inside Gaza, residents receive small quantities of flour — some of which is also expired. But because most bakeries are no longer able to operate, Eid noted, “we have to buy wheat [that arrives in aid packages], grind it by hand, and bake it at home. Cooking gas is very limited and expensive, so we have to use wood from bombed-out houses and trees uprooted by airstrikes.” Some people have also resorted to building bread ovens out of clay, animal dung, and straw.
Soon after the onset of the war, Israel shut off the pipes supplying Gaza with water, and the cessation of aid entering through the Rafah Crossing since May means bottled water is increasingly hard to find. Water tanks connected to people’s homes have been largely destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. Tap water, drawn from Gaza’s aquifer, is polluted with sewage and seawater, yet people have no choice but to use it for drinking, bathing, and cooking, causing many residents to fall ill with gastroenteritis and hepatitis. Skin diseases are also spreading rapidly, and polio has been detected in wastewater.
A few small-scale water desalination facilities are functioning, while some mosques and other institutions have their own water purification systems, so residents queue to collect water from there. “We carry buckets of water from far away so that we can go to the bathroom, wash clothes, and bathe at home,” Eid said. “I swear, even as a young man, in the prime of my life, my back has become exhausted.”
In the scorching heat of summer, friends and family manage to shower only once every 7-10 days. Shampoo is not available, and some corrupt hygiene products have contributed to the spread of skin infections.
Renting slippers for an hour
As quality of life has deteriorated in Gaza, the cost of living has spiraled exponentially. The price of basic goods in the market such as meat, flour, water, and vegetables is now 25 to 50 times higher than before the war.
“We are all dying slowly,” Eid told me. “We are no longer able to provide daily food [for our families]. A bag of flour that used to cost NIS 30 [$8] now costs NIS 500 [$137], and is very difficult to obtain. Each household needs four bags of flour per month because of the large number of people living in one house. We can see a difference in our children’s bodies.”
Most people have been out of work for 10 months, and are struggling to afford these prices. My brother Ismail, 32, who is a smoker, laments “the skyrocketing price of cigarettes,” adding: “Items [in the market] that you would previously not hesitate to buy are now too expensive or too rare to find.”
Even obtaining cash is increasingly difficult. Almost all of Gaza’s banks and ATMs have ceased functioning. In central Gaza, most people get cash by paying large commissions either at exchange offices or from a branch of Bank of Palestine — the only bank that remains open in the city of Deir al-Balah — where they queue for hours, if not days, to receive small sums. On Aug. 11, the branch was stormed by gunmen whose identity and intentions are not known.
Israel has blocked imports of cash into the Strip, and sending money to Gazan bank accounts from abroad is expensive, with exchange offices deducting up to 25 percent of the transfer sum as a commission. The overuse of banknotes has devalued them — albeit creating new jobs for people trying to repair them and make some money — and criminal gangs are exploiting the lack of cash by operating a black market.
Most Gazans were initially displaced from their homes during winter, but because Israel has prohibited the entry of clothing, summer clothes and shoes are scarce and people do their best to reuse or convert their own remaining items. Ismail, my brother, laughed as he told me that some Palestinians in Gaza “even rent out slippers for an hour or two for less than a dollar.” As comical as they may sound, these stories speak volumes about the reality Gazans are facing, deprived of even the simplest necessities — and doing whatever they can to support themselves and their families.
Making tents out of aid parachutes
Even before October 7, Palestinians in Gaza were limited to a few hours of electricity a day under Israeli’s military blockade, and relied on alternative methods of generating electricity such as generators and solar panels.
However, with Israel’s imposition of a “total siege,” the fuel required to power generators soon became scarce. While car batteries and other smaller batteries could provide electricity at the beginning of the war, most have now been fully drained. As a result, most Gazans, including my family, use solar panels to charge their phones in order to speak to loved ones and watch the news — most of which replays the horrors they are living through.
Many residents already owned solar panels; others bought from those whose houses were bombed, or paid neighbors to use theirs. Nowadays, however, they are in short supply and prohibitively expensive — and have even been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.
With the shortage of fuel, most people no longer have the luxury of being able to travel by car. Some get around by donkey carts, while most are forced to walk. Donkeys, Gazans joke, have been more useful than most governments and international actors.
My family considers themselves lucky that their home is still standing, even if it is overcrowded with relatives. Most Gazans have been displaced multiple times, and now hundreds of thousands live in tent camps, where they are forced to use communal toilets and showers, and construct their own shelters — a skill that many learn out of necessity.
Tents are made from whatever materials are available: wood, nylon, cloth, or the remains of parachutes from airdropped aid. Right now, in the heat of summer, the tents feel like an oven; during the cold winter months, they did little to protect from the elements.
Burying new martyrs in old graves
One of the most difficult moments during the last 10 months was when my father passed away in May. He had dealt with chronic blood sugar and blood pressure problems, and had suffered multiple strokes — which had recently led him to be diagnosed with Dejerine Roussy syndrome. I was only able to send him the necessary medicine via an international delegation that entered Gaza.
My father felt his time was coming to an end, and he refused to leave Gaza, eventually suffering a brain stroke that took his life. I spent long hours on the phone trying to help save his life, but with the lack of medicine in the Strip, we were ultimately unsuccessful.
Sadly, my father’s case was not unique among the thousands of chronically or terminally ill Palestinians in Gaza, who have long struggled to access proper care under the Israeli blockade. Many cancer patients, in particular, have lost their lives over the years waiting for Israeli permits to leave the Strip. Some patients receive permits for one chemotherapy session, but no follow ups. The military has also blackmailed cancer patients, offering medical permits only if they agree to collaborate with Israeli intelligence.
In November, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in Gaza City, which had been the Strip’s main cancer treatment center since it opened in 2017, ran out of fuel and stopped functioning. The Israeli army subsequently occupied the facility and used it as a base.
“The war and the siege are especially difficult for patients like us who cannot receive treatment or necessary medical imaging, and there is no one to follow up on our condition,” Najwa Abu Yousef, my 58-year-old neighbor who is a cancer patient, told me. “We survive by eating the canned goods that come as aid, but these are unhealthy and people like me, who are sick, should not be eating them. My health condition has severely deteriorated, and since October I’ve lost consciousness twice — both for a period of 10 to 15 minutes — due to my illness and weak immune system.”
Even Gaza’s dead are denied the respect and dignity of a proper burial. So many Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s attacks — the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll currently stands at around 40,000, with an additional 10,000 thought to be under the rubble of their homes — that their families have had to bury them in mass graves, or dig up the graves of family members who died before and bury the new martyrs in the same spot.
No one should have to live like this. We urgently need U.S. and international action to stop the genocide. Every day Palestinians wake up and go to sleep with the news of death. The sound of bombs and drones has become the soundtrack to their lives. Gazans spend every waking hour with one question on their mind: When will this nightmare end?
Yousef Aljamal is originally from Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza; he is the Gaza Coordinator at the Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
