Reem A. Hamadaqa
Mondoweiss / August 14, 2024
Gaza’s landscape is dominated by tents that have become homes to the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. But building a tent and living in one with your entire family isn’t easy.
As my eyes roam across the wide sky before me, the scene is dominated by the unorganized tents I see wherever I look. I also see palm trees, fighter jets, drones, kites too, but there are no tall houses anymore. All the high-rises in Gaza City, as far as the eye can see, have been leveled. My home is among them.
Genocide has a sound. It is the buzzing of drones and the sound that a building makes when it is turned into rubble. Amid the destruction wrought by bulldozers and tanks, each of us has been forced to start our own multi-chapter journey of displacement.
Living far from home due to displacement hurts a person’s heart. But at least my family and I were initially displaced to other houses.
After the final house where we sought shelter was bombed and leveled to the ground, we had no place to go. Like hundreds of thousands of other displaced Gazans who have no place, too, our last resort was to make a “tent.”
Building a tent
When you find yourself homeless on the streets of Gaza during the current genocide, you have two choices.
One of them is to buy a ready-made tent. In theory, these tents were meant to be distributed to the displaced by aid groups, but nearly every single family living in a ready-made tent that I asked said they had bought it. While each tent has the large word “AID” written across the side, people are buying them at prices ranging from $200 to $1000, according to their type, height, and the room inside.
Your other option is to build your own tent. This requires a number of men to help and the cost of equipment. Wood, a tent covering, and blankets are needed. As nearly every family fled under fire without taking anything, you need to buy every single piece.
Building a tent is not that much cheaper than buying a ready-made one. Each tent has a different price according to height, space, pieces of wood, and type of covering. A piece of wood costs about $15 to $25, but you will need many pieces to set the tent up. Blankets and tent coverings cost nearly $70 to $100. Prices vary according to your timing and when you want to build your tent. For example, the cost of supplies always rises when people have been forced to flee to a new location.
Building the tent takes time, effort, and money. You also need a plan to build it efficiently. In the meantime, since building a tent requires days or maybe weeks, you will likely be forced to sleep in the street.
If you succeed in getting all the needed supplies, looking for an empty place may hinder the whole effort. Sleeping in the streets could be your only choice.
Gazans have been forced to flee from one place to another multiple times. And they had to go through all of these previous steps many times. Because you need to build another tent every time you flee.
Your tent is your whole house. You must now fit your old house into a 4×4 meter area: the kitchen, the bedrooms for each family member, the living room, and a small bathroom behind it.
All tent types are hot, no matter the material. Sand is your floor, and the sky is your ceiling. You wake up at dawn. When the sun rises the light brightens the tent, and the heat and buzzing flies invade your sleep. You have no other choice but to leave the blazing tent. You escape looking for shadows.
Tents are built only for sleeping and for nighttime use. During daylight, being inside one is unbearable. Just take your chair, pillow — or phone if it’s charged — and search for a cooler place.
To make your tent your house, you need to buy every single tool from scratch. Since many houses have been bombed, finding utensils, blankets, clothes, and other things becomes impossible. And if you do find them, their prices have increased tenfold.
Not even a drop of water is found at home. It has become a luxury.
And when we talk about water, we mean water for washing, bathing, cooking, and other tasks — not filtered drinking water. Finding water to drink has been an impossible mission since last November.
“I admit that war has challenged us all, but not being able to drink filtered water aches my head,” our neighbor recently commented desperately. My brother added, “finding both water to use and filtered water to drink is a luxury that aches both my heart and my head.”
To find water, you need to walk vast miles to get some and then carry it back yourself. To fill a 15-liter water container, you have to walk long miles and pay about a dollar or two. Carrying these water gallons back is a harsh challenge under the sun’s heat.
If you’re lucky and have a cart, you can use this transport to get water from farther places. This is a luxury. Not all people here at the camp have a cart, though, so people borrow others so they can collect as much water as possible without having to carry it themselves.
Sometimes water trucks come so people can fill their gallons. But the huge number of people who need water overwhelms the very small number of trucks that arrive. You hear the sound of the trucks arriving, and then you see people running, men, women, girls, kids, and elderly people with their gallons in their hands. They all gather, shout, run, hand over their gallons, and get wet by the running water. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll have your gallons, or some of them, filled, but most times you’ll return helplessly, trying to think of other possible options that you don’t have.
Roaming the entire daylight hours looking for life’s basics makes your body and soul exhausted. As the weather gets a little bit better at night, you sit in front of your tent. Sand is your floor and the sky is your ceiling. You start counting the shining stars, but when some start moving fast, and you know they are not stars. Drones are buzzing, poised to kill more women and children, to end many people’s life chapters, as well as those of their families and friends.
I hope soon that only kites will fill the skies. And the unorganized tents will disappear, and our high-rise houses will return to fill the landscape as far as I can see.
Reem A. Hamadaqa is translator and writer in Gaza, Palestine
