Wringing hope from the rubble of the Gaza Strip
By AARON BOXERMAN
The ceasefire last October ostensibly brought an end to Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip after the Hamas-led attacks Oct. 7, 2023.
A year later, however, Israeli strikes, though less frequent, haven’t stopped. More than 1,400 people in Gaza have been killed since the truce was signed, according to local health officials. Israel says it is still targeting Hamas militants.
Palestinians in Gaza are trying to reconstruct their lives and livelihoods, seeking to wring a measure of normalcy from the debris. Some are trying to rebuild, using whatever materials they can scavenge. Others are trying to revive their businesses or launch new ones.
For three years, their lives have been consumed by death and destruction. But the bombs, hunger and displacement have not erased their aspirations for something better.
Rebuilding from rubble
Jaafar Atallah, 28, once earned a living in his family’s factory making bowls and vases from rich clay deposits near his home in the al-Waha area of northern Gaza. His home was razed during the Israeli military campaign. So Atallah and his family reestablished their business in al-Zawaydeh, a town in central Gaza.
For a place to live, Atallah built a modest dwelling out of red bricks fired in their kiln. They no longer have the heavy machinery required to extract clay from the ground, but they have something nearly as good, he said.
“We go to a crater from an Israeli bombing, because there you can get to the clay,” Atallah said. “We dig it out, purify it and get to work.”
The dwelling is a single room in which he now lives with his pregnant wife. The walls, made from brick reinforced with hay, provide natural cooling during Gaza’s punishing summer heat.
Atallah hopes they will also help keep them warm in winter.
The United Nations says that about 80% of Gaza’s buildings were destroyed or damaged in the war. Much of the enclave was leveled during Israel’s withering attack, which killed at least 74,000 people, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. That offensive was prompted by the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 hostages were seized.
A few Palestinians in Gaza are lucky enough to have homes that are still standing or wealthy enough to pay rent. Most of the rest live in the enclave’s sprawling tent camps.
A reason to celebrate
Before the war, weddings in Gaza could be extravagant affairs, featuring sumptuous meals of roast lamb and processions through the winding streets.
Such pleasures now feel like faraway luxuries for many Gaza residents.
One couple held their wedding in a United Nations school packed with displaced residents. Another pair tied the knot on a beach with little fanfare.
To pay for his wedding, Saeed Kafarneh, 21, worked for several months doing odd jobs and selling gas tanks and cartons of aid he received from relief groups to raise about $2,000.
“We worked so hard to make it happen,” Kafarneh said. “But thank God, we did it.”
Last month, Kafarneh married his wife, Nermeen Abdul Hadi, in a displaced persons camp in central Gaza, where Kafarneh’s family had been sheltering. On the day of the ceremony, Kafarneh and his relatives decorated a large tent donated by a Pakistani aid organization, setting up lights and arranging flowers. They rented a large loudspeaker.
In one Palestinian custom, grooms bathe beforehand at a bathhouse or friend’s home, a ritual marking the transition to married life. Instead, friends and neighbors poured water on a grinning Kafarneh in a tent while they cheered and danced.
The couple had their zifaf, or ceremony. Many friends and family members could not make it. Traveling even a short distance in Gaza — where fuel prices are sky-high — can be enormously expensive. Others avoided making the trip, fearing potential Israeli attacks during their return journey after dark, Kafarneh said.
“Even people just a few kilometers away didn’t come,” he said. “So we celebrated with those around us.”
Making a living again
Nivin al-Ashqar hears two constant hums when she goes onto the roof of her home in the northern Gaza town of Jabalia.
One comes from the beehives that she and her husband cultivate to produce honey and beeswax for sale. The other is from Israeli drones that hover overhead, a reminder that their house lies just a few hundred yards from the demarcation line behind which the Israeli military has entrenched itself.
The Trump administration’s ceasefire plan envisioned a gradual Israeli withdrawal, in parallel with Hamas’ disarmament, but neither has happened.
Before the war, in addition to a single hive they kept at home, al-Ashqar’s family had about 400 hives, mostly in the area now under Israeli military control. Almost all those hives were destroyed during the conflict, she said.
Early in the war, al-Ashqar fled fighting in Jabalia with her family. When they returned more than a year later to try to clean up their badly damaged house, she heard a relentless buzzing.
“We climbed up to the roof and we saw a cloud of bees emerging from the rubble,” al-Ashqar said. “It was an unbelievable feeling, indescribable.”
Al-Ashqar is the primary breadwinner in her household because her husband and one of her sons were wounded during the war. She has turned again to raising bees, hoping to sell their honey.
“With both of them wounded, I’ve become the one responsible for the home,” al-Ashqar said. “My husband helps, with his experience, but I have to run it.”
Gaza’s economy was devastated in the war. A few, like al-Ashqar, are slowly coaxing their businesses back to life.
Fishermen are setting out to sea, although they fear running afoul of an Israeli naval blockade of the enclave if they head too far out. Barbers who once owned their own shops now practice their trade in makeshift salons.
Al-Ashqar’s bees now populate six hives but produce relatively little honey. Even basic staples like sugar to feed them are more expensive, while other materials — like miticides — can be hard to come by at all.
More than half of Gaza is now also effectively off-limits to al-Ashqar, as it is to the vast majority of the 2 million Palestinians living there. But, she said, she regularly sees her bees flitting away toward the Israeli-controlled zone, crossing to places she can no longer visit.
“Sometimes, I wish I were a bee,” al-Ashqar said, “so I could fly away from here, go to other countries, rather than stay here, trapped.”
