Gas rationed to 18 minutes daily; worn skateboards cannot be replaced
A team from The Guardian followed five Palestinians through a single day in Gaza, documenting the small acts — boiling water, lighting a fire, salvaging a skateboard — that define daily life under Israeli blockade. The project, published Saturday by reporter Tess McClure, profiles a pregnant woman who lost three children in an Israeli strike, a 12-year-old boy living in a tent among beach dunes, a 30-year-old skateboard team leader, a university professor, and a grandmother living in a truck.
The article is an attempt to make visible the routines that, as McClure writes, “rarely make the headlines” — the acts of survival and normalcy that coexist with the bombings and mass deaths that typically anchor coverage of Gaza.
For Alaa Hessi, in her final month of pregnancy, the morning ritual of making tea begins with a calculation of gas rations. Her family receives 6kg of gas every three months — enough to heat a pot for 18 minutes a day — a quantity needed for cooking. To make tea, the family must build a fire instead.
Twelve-year-old Ramadan lives in a tent among the dunes at Al-Nuwairi, near Nuseirat. His version of the same task begins with a hunt for anything flammable in an environment where, the Guardian reports, there is almost no wood left. He scouts through the sand dunes for twigs from thorn bushes and feeds the flames with pieces of discarded plastic that wash up on the beach. Before boiling the kettle, he must determine whether a water truck will visit his area that day and, if not, how far to walk to find water; all of his family’s large water containers have been chewed through by rats. Crouched over the teapot, Ramadan recalls last year’s famine, when aid points became death traps and he and his brother risked their lives sprinting for bags of flour or sugar. He remembers the boys he saw shot beside him because they moved too soon or too late.
Each profile documents a different constraint. Prof Mahmoud Seydam wires a solar panel to power a laptop, uploading lectures over WhatsApp and taking oral presentations instead of written exams — what the Guardian describes as a battle to provide an education without paper, notebooks, or a university campus. Rajab al-Reefi has run Gaza Skate Team for five years; the Guardian reports that a ban on skateboards has shaped his work, with the team’s weekly gatherings becoming a lifeline for displaced children during the war. After their skatepark was demolished, the team posted videos of tricks performed on the rubble. When the boards wore out, members salvaged parts from a bombed building’s wreckage, leaving them with a handful of working boards “on their last legs” — with nothing coming to replace them when they wear out. Mansoura Ibrahim Mohammed Abdel Dayem lives in the back of a flatbed truck and tells her grandchildren stories of their history; Ramadan watches the ocean and dreams of becoming a lifeguard.
The blockade, the Guardian reports, classifies a wide range of ordinary objects as “dual use” items that could be used by Hamas, banning their import. The blacklist’s criteria are described as “opaque, arbitrary and ever-changing.” At various times, the list has blocked ventilator machines, cancer medications, wedding dresses, sewing machines, toys, musical instruments, spices, dates, and crutches. Israel continues to control everything that passes into Gaza, deciding how many calories to allocate and how much gas can be “eked out to heat a minimum of hot meals,” according to the Guardian.
Since being interviewed, Hessi has given birth to a boy she named Waseem, after one of the sons she lost. Photography by Amjed Tantesh accompanies the profiles.