olivewire.org

A Day in a Gaza Family’s Life: Daily Routine Under the Blockade

The alarm does not go off at a fixed hour in a Gaza home. It goes off when the electricity does.

In the years before October 2023, Gaza’s roughly 2.3 million residents lived according to a rotating schedule of power cuts that the Gaza Power Plant and the Israeli electricity authority together imposed on the Strip. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and OCHA-oPt documented the situation with care: by 2022, most Gaza households were receiving between eight and twelve hours of electricity per day, supplied in rolling blocks that shifted by neighborhood. In many areas the power came on at four in the morning and was gone by noon. In others it arrived at noon and vanished by midnight. Families built their entire domestic architecture around those windows.

Atef Abu Saif — the Palestinian novelist and political analyst who served as Gaza’s Minister of Culture and who kept a diary of life under siege that was published in English as The Drone Eats with Me — wrote about this scheduling with a kind of dark domesticity. The hours of electricity, he observed, were not simply hours of light. They were the hours in which you cooked, charged every device in the house, ran the water pump to fill the roof tank, did the laundry, and made sure the children’s schoolbags were ready under the light of an actual bulb. When the power cut, life reorganized itself around what had been done and what had been left undone.

The Morning Choreography

Imagine, then, a family in the Shujaiya neighborhood on the eastern edge of Gaza City. The parents are awake before the children. The pump runs. Water from the municipal network — available, according to OCHA-oPt’s 2022 reporting, for roughly six to eight hours every three or four days, and heavily contaminated by seawater intrusion — has been flowing intermittently into the building’s underground cistern. The roof tank, which holds perhaps a day’s worth if the family is careful, must be topped up whenever both conditions are met: the municipal water is running and the electricity is on. On many days, only one of those conditions is true.

The children dress by the light of a phone screen or a small battery lamp kept charged during the previous electricity window. UNRWA operates 276 schools across Gaza, and in a normal school-year day, hundreds of thousands of children file past blue-and-white UN flags and hand-painted murals to sit in classrooms that themselves ran on generator power when the grid was off. The poet Mosab Abu Toha, who grew up in Beit Lahiya and whose poetry collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear documents the texture of life in northern Gaza, has written of school as a place that held meaning precisely because so much outside it was precarious. A teacher’s voice. A book borrowed from the UNRWA library. A window that looked out on a neighborhood rather than a checkpoint. These were not small things.

The school run itself is short in distance — Gaza is forty-one kilometers long and between six and twelve kilometers wide — but dense in texture. The streets in Shujaiya pass shuttered factories, a UN-flag-marked health clinic, a corner where men gather early for news. The children pass a bakery.

The Bread Queue

The bakery queue is a social institution. Gaza has imported roughly eighty-five percent of its food, and wheat flour has been subject to the restrictions of the blockade that Israel imposed in 2007 following Hamas’s takeover of the Strip. UNCTAD’s 2020 assessment of the blockade’s cumulative economic effect documented how Gaza’s GDP per capita had fallen to a fraction of what it had been in the 1990s, and how unemployment — particularly among young men — had exceeded fifty percent in some years.

Bread is subsidized, queued for, and shared. A woman holds a place in line while her neighbor watches the younger children. A teenager carries home a stack of flatbreads balanced against his chest. This is not poverty rendered picturesque; it is a system of mutual care that has grown up inside a system of deliberate constraint.

OCHA-oPt’s humanitarian snapshots from 2021 and 2022 noted that around ninety-six percent of Gaza’s groundwater was unfit for human consumption by WHO standards — a figure that WHO itself confirmed — the result of over-extraction, sewage infiltration, and the saltwater intrusion caused by Israel’s control over water infrastructure inputs. Families either paid for desalinated water from private vendors, at prices that could consume ten percent or more of a household’s daily income, or they drank water they knew was not safe.

The Father’s Day: A Permit That Never Came

While the children are at school and the bread is at home, the father’s morning takes a different shape. Gaza’s formal private sector was largely dismantled by the blockade. The industrial zone at Karni — once Gaza’s main commercial crossing, where goods and workers once moved — had been reduced to minimal operation. Gisha, the Israeli legal center for freedom of movement, documented across multiple years of reporting how Gaza workers were systematically denied access to employment inside Israel or the West Bank.

A worker permit for Israel represents, in Gaza, something close to a financial lifeline. In the period from 2010 to 2022, the number of permits issued fluctuated dramatically depending on Israeli security assessments, collective punishment measures following escalations, and administrative delays. B’Tselem has characterized the permit system as a mechanism of control rather than security, noting how approvals can be revoked overnight, how family members of anyone detained can find their own permits refused, how the process is opaque and unappealable in any meaningful sense.

For a man whose application has been denied — on security grounds that are never explained, through a process that offers no recourse — the morning does not lead to a factory floor. It leads to a plastic chair outside a government office, or to a conversation with a neighbor about whether the permit broker in Khan Younis can try again, or to a walk along the beach because at least the sea is not behind a wall. Abu Saif writes about men like this with recognition and without condescension: they are not defeated by the occupation so much as they are perpetually resisting its effort to define them by what it has taken away.

Afternoon: The Electricity Returns

If the schedule holds — and the schedule often did not hold, disrupted by fuel shortages at the power plant or Israeli strikes on infrastructure — the electricity comes back in the early afternoon. Everything happens at once. A rice pot goes on the gas burner but the electric kettle also runs. Phones are charged. A child does homework under a real ceiling light. The water pump cycles on again.

Mosab Abu Toha has described the particular quality of Gaza afternoons in his essays and interviews: the way the light comes in off the Mediterranean, the smell of sea salt and coffee, the sound of children in the street. These things were real. They existed alongside the checkpoints, the permit denials, the contaminated water, the electricity cuts. The blockade was not the sum total of what Gaza was. But it structured every hour of every day for every family inside it, before October 2023 made even those constrained hours a memory.

What Routine Means Under Siege

Routine is ordinarily a comfort — the scaffolding of ordinary life. In Gaza before October 2023, routine was something built against pressure, rebuilt after each escalation, calibrated to an electricity schedule, rationed like water, queued for like bread. It was, in its way, a form of resistance: the insistence that life continues, that children go to school, that bread is made and shared, that a father keeps filing paperwork for a permit he may never receive.

International humanitarian law — the Fourth Geneva Convention, affirmed repeatedly by the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council — prohibits collective punishment of a civilian population. The blockade has been assessed by the UN Secretary-General’s office, by ICRC, and by multiple human rights organizations as constituting exactly that. The daily routine of a Gaza family is the lived texture of what that legal conclusion means.

Sources

Étiqueté , , ,

Laisser un commentaire

Votre adresse e-mail ne sera pas publiée. Les champs obligatoires sont indiqués avec *