Children in Gaza used to aspire to become doctors or teachers, but today their dreams revolve around running a community kitchen, handing out aid, or leading a shelter. Yet even though the genocide rewrote their ambitions, it couldn’t erase them.
In Gaza’s displacement camps, survival has bred a new economy: a gym owner forges weights from empty cans, a supermarket owner turns baker, a housewife becomes a street vendor — each person rebuilding a livelihood from the wreckage of genocide.
With reconstruction stalled in Gaza, boys as young as 14 are clearing the wreckage of destroyed homes by hand for as little as $10 a day. Often they are the breadwinners for their families and are forced to abandon their studies to work for survival.
Nearly three years after a November 2023 Israeli airstrike buried them in the rubble, Gaza families recovered 112 of their dead and laid them to rest, including a mother still embracing her three children.
I called a man in Gaza to ask about how he’s surviving cancer amid Israel’s restrictions on the entry of medicine into the Strip. His son answered and told me his father had already died waiting for care.
An Israeli strike destroyed two major medicine warehouses in Deir al-Balah, the latest Israeli attack on Gaza’s failing health system. Gaza’s Health Ministry says medicine shortages are now killing three cancer patients a day.
Hours after Donald Trump announced a “historic” agreement for disarming Hamas and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Israel attacked Gaza, killing 19. Palestinians weren’t surprised. “We don’t trust Israel, and we don’t trust America,” said one resident.
Despite displacement, hunger, and the loss of their homes, Gaza’s students sat for their national high school exams and still came out on top.
For nine days, Fatima Abu Khammash searched for her missing son across Gaza’s Israeli-controlled zone. When they refused to hand over his body, she crossed the line herself, finding a mother’s uneasy peace in what she carried back.
Hamas dissolved its government in Gaza to remove Israel’s pretexts for delaying reconstruction and withdrawal. But Israel is now doubling down on a demand for full disarmament before any withdrawal, a precondition designed to be impossible to meet.