“What Choice Do We Have but to Be Resilient?”: Scenes of Daily Life in Gaza

Tel Aviv is less than an hour’s drive from Gaza, but it feels like it’s on a different planet. The night before leaving for the strip, I had overpriced cocktails with a friend on a street pulsating with music and tanned youth enjoying the post-COVID city to its fullest. It could have been Miami or Brooklyn.   

I drove down south the next day, searching for the remnants of the latest round of violence in Israeli towns. A ceasefire had been declared a few days before, after 11 days in which 256 Palestinians and 13 people in Israeli were killed. I had tracked down the names of streets where rockets fired by Hamas had fallen, but struggled to find the impact sites. In some cases Israeli flags hung over damage to hide it from gawkers. Other spots had already been patched up. I found some damaged buildings in Ashkelon, where a stoned security guard shook his head and clucked his tongue as he patiently pointed out every shred of destruction no matter how small: a smoke-scorched door, some shattered glass, a damaged fence. I continued to Zikim beach, which runs into the Gaza border, and watched Israelis frolicking in the surf and eating ice cream. Despite the idyllic scene, the signs of the ongoing blockade were omnipresent—a massive security wall extending into the sea, watchtowers, soldiers on leave, and a few beachgoers armed with M4 carbines. In the Israeli towns surrounding Gaza, concrete bomb shelters are almost always within a quick sprint, though many seemed to double as a spot to toss trash or urinate. 

The next morning I entered Gaza through a large, modern terminal at the Erez crossing. It was nearly empty, as it often is. After having my documentation examined (an Israeli-issued press card and a letter from the Ministry of Health clearing me from quarantine after a positive test for antibodies), I was cleared to enter an overground tunnel enclosed in steel mesh that runs through no-mans-land. On the other side the Palestinian Authority did a cursory check of my passport, but it holds no real authority in the strip. Hamas, the militant group that has ruled since 2007, controls access. 

Only journalists and aid workers can enter Gaza, and very few Palestinians are granted entry and exit privileges. At dinner one evening, a Palestinian woman working as a dentist at the U.N. told me the story of her husband’s cancer diagnosis. They sought treatment at a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem, but were not granted a permit until the cancer had progressed from stage I to stage IV. He was unable to tell me the story himself—his larynx had been removed because of the severity of the cancer. 

I’d covered the 2014 war, and the nature of the ruin was substantially different this time. In 2014 the destruction was concentrated on the outskirts of downtown in low-slung residential housing. Whole neighborhoods were flattened by the bombing and the ground invasion. The Shujaiyah neighborhood in particular resembled a grid on a map that had been marked for complete destruction. In 2021, however, Israeli air strikes were largely focused on infrastructure. Tall buildings housing media, legal, and accounting offices folded onto the ground like collapsed blocks. A major bookstore was shattered, destroying 100,000 books. Dr. Ayman Abu al-Ouf, the director of Gaza’s COVID-19 response, was killed along with 12 members of his family. In all cases the Israeli government said it was targeting Hamas facilities or personnel nestled in civilian buildings.  

By the collapsed Al Shorouq tower downtown, commerce had returned to normal around a vast pile of shattered concrete. Street vendors hawked wares, and a dress shop next to the tower did a steady stream of business. An exhausted tailor smoked a cigarette while in the next room a group of women contemplated a procession of eveningwear. On the street a child begged his mom for a balloon. Despite the facade of normality, you could feel the exhaustion and tension. As I waited for night to fall, a vicious fight broke out between two teenagers. A young man sat by himself on a stoop and bounced his leg frantically, his eyes darting. Most people simply walked by the destruction as if it weren’t there.

At the Isa’ad Altofola Center (Children’s Happiness Center), a woman led a group of women in laughter therapy. Despite some skepticism, the women gamely agreed, chuckling nervously at first, then transitioning to great, sincere belly laughs. Some sounded slightly frenzied, and began to weep.  

At a place called the Friends Club, teenagers learned to jump horses imported from Europe as their parents chatted or checked their phones at nearby tables. At a nearby “victory rally” for Hamas, wide-eyed kids stared excitedly at the guns of the masked militants and took countless selfies. As the speeches droned on, people began to slip away from boredom. A barber gave fashionable haircuts in the ruins of his shattered shop while his friend searched for anything he could salvage. He found some intact tea glasses in a box, exclaiming, “Made in China,” while chuckling, rolling his eyes, and placing them aside roughly. In another ruined building, a wilted young man picked at the formless rubble. His friend told me he was searching for the engagement ring he had given to his fiancée, killed in the bombing. 

I mentioned the resilience I’d observed to Issam Adwan, project manager for the NGO We Are Not Numbers, who snorted and retorted, “What choice do we have but to be resilient? We aren’t allowed to leave Gaza. Believe me, no one wants this resilience.”