They say time takes care of everything. Not in Gaza. Here, time is another enemy – it worsens everything it touches. How would time make displacement easier? Seasons come and go, and conditions grow harsher. How would time remove a father’s helplessness at being unable to offer shelter to his family or a quiet room for his teenage daughter preparing for the exams that will define her future?
In October 2024, I successfully defended my PhD thesis. I prepared for it across endless nights in our tent in al-Mawasi, under dim lights, struggling to print resources, reading and writing between the daily work of surviving and reporting on an unfolding famine.
When it was done, people called it resilience. It was reported that way: a Gazan completing his doctorate from a displacement tent. I let it be called that. What I did not say was what came after – the helplessness, the guilt, the understanding that the certificate changes nothing about the lack of a roof over my family’s heads.
That was 20 months ago. I am still in a tent, and now my 17-year-old daughter Dana is studying for the most important exam of her life in similar conditions. On 20 June, her Tawjihi exams will begin – the national secondary school matriculation exams that determine university entry. Like her father, she will sit for them having prepared inside a tent.
Every morning before sunrise, Dana finishes her Fajr prayer, recites the Quran, which she memorised entirely last year, and then begins studying. She sits on a plastic chair that was never built for more than an hour’s use, at a table barely wide enough for her books. She stays there for more than 10 hours studying mathematics, physics, chemistry, and English.
I watch her and I cannot hold myself together. She notices, but she holds herself together better than I do, better than her mother, better than her grandparents, who live nearby in their own displacement tent and look at her with undisguised grief because of our current conditions and because of what the future inevitably holds. Still, she turns to all of us with a calm that shames the rest of us. “The bitterness of this reality is what sweetens my study hours,” she says.
These are large words for a child shaped entirely by war. Her ambitions have been formed by the losses around her: Dana wants to work in technology – coding or artificial intelligence – because, as she puts it, “I could earn money quickly and help make up for what we’ve lost.”
What passes for home
Like almost everyone else in Gaza, we have been permanently homeless now for many months. During the previous ceasefire – from mid-January to mid-March 2025 – we returned to our home in Khan Younis, which was still partially habitable. We spent more than $7,000 on repairs. It was far from adequate. We told ourselves it would be enough. But in May 2025 – only five months after we had returned – the Israeli military ordered us to leave again.
Following the ceasefire agreement signed last October, we were finally able to return to check on our house again. It was completely demolished. Not partially damaged as before. Gone.
Now, my family of seven – myself, my wife, and our five children: Dana; 15-year-old Liyan; 13-year-old Raza; eight-year-old Lama; and Imran, who has not yet turned four – have moved from our two-storey, 200-square-metre home into a tent for the foreseeable future.
Despite the US-brokered ceasefire agreement, Israel is barring cement and all construction materials and heavy machinery from entering Gaza. There is no reconstruction. There are only tents, some sturdier than others. The sturdier version is what I am now trying to build for my family, and it comes at a steep cost.
We have been living side by side in two tents and a few old brick rooms with some of my wife’s relatives since we arrived in al-Mawasi. There are three families and 17 people in total. After nearly a year, our family needs its own structure. The only option is what is locally called a greenhouse shelter: an agricultural frame of steel arches and thick nylon, nine metres by seven and a half. Forty-five square metres for seven people.
I have spent weeks walking Gaza’s salvage markets with two friends. Everything sold there has been pulled from demolished homes and bulldozed land. I have become, out of necessity, an expert in things I never wanted to know: the difference between Egyptian and Israeli nylon grades, the correct pipe diameter for greenhouse arches, the going rate for reclaimed timber.
The steel frame costs more than $3,500. Covering it in layered nylon: $1,000. Used floor tiles extracted from destroyed buildings: $1,500. A toilet enclosure: $1,700. Kitchen fittings and water pipes: $800. A water tank, stand, plumbing, and weak battery-powered lighting: over $1,000.
Every component is second-hand, recovered from someone else’s destroyed life. The total exceeds $10,000 for a shelter of iron pipes and plastic sheeting. Before this war, $10,000 could have built a proper two-room home from brick.
“Please ask God to open the crossings”
I have not yet written about my wife.
She wakes at night and speaks without knowing she is speaking as if we are still living our life before the war. “Turn off the air conditioning, Mohamed.” “Don’t cut the roses, they’re still blooming.” “Girls, everyone back to your own rooms. It’s a school day tomorrow.” Then she surfaces into the present, and the tears begin – the kind that come from somewhere so deep it sounds like something tearing.
She had a garden: fig trees, orange trees, a palm, roses, mint, thyme, sage, and marjoram. Inside our house, she had put thought into every room – the furniture chosen over years, each child with their own bed and their own space. Now, as we work to prepare our new shelter, she retreats to cry. The children keep talking about what we had, half-believing, still, that the war will end properly, that a house will be rebuilt. Nothing visible on the ground confirms that belief.
My youngest, Imran, was one and a half years old when we were first displaced in December 2023, and so has no memory of our home. He knows it only from photographs and videos on his sister Liyan’s phone. He points at the screen: “Take me there. I don’t want al-Mawasi. You got to have fun there. I didn’t.”
He asks who bombed the house. He asks why I don’t just build a new one.
“The crossings are closed,” Liyan tries to explain. “The occupation controls them. There’s no building until they open and materials come through.”
Now, Imran stations himself beside anyone he sees praying and makes his request: “Please ask God to open the crossings so we can bring materials and build a new house.” He does not fully understand what a crossing is. He understands there is something blocking the way between him and a home, and that prayer might move it.
We sit together and discuss the new shelter as something to look forward to: the layout, where the entrance will face. Razan has drawn up a floor plan with labelled doorways. Lama, who is eight, has drawn the garden she wants to plant around it: flowers and a tree.
I let them plan. I encourage it. It gives them something to move towards rather than only something that has been taken.
The new shelter will stand about 200 metres from where we are now. It will be the first space fully ours since May 2025.
But in the meantime, in a nearby tent I set up for her away from the daily chaos, Dana is already at her plastic chair, 10 hours of concentration ahead of her. She sleeps, studies, and prays in that makeshift room of nylon, preparing for a future none of us has any control over. She does this with a faith and a discipline that humbles me, and that I have no adequate words for.
This story was originally published by The New Humanitarian.
The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
Mohamed al Astal
