By Dr Marwan Asmar
As the winter months approach many people in Gaza continue to sleep outside as the cold freezing air starts to bite. They have been displaced countless times in this Israeli war and have nowhere to go as their homes have been bombed multiple times with the 2.2 million population turned into mass internal refugees.
One such family, without a husband, in south Gaza continues to sleep on the side of the road among the debris and moving cars and vehicles. Others, sleep in makeshift sheets and plastic, hastily hoisted to try and protect them and keep the freezing air out.
…On the roadside
“Don’t worry it will not fall down, now shut up and sleep”, a mother tells her little one who found a ramshackle place on the side of the road. “And the same goes for you,” she tells the other child.
But how can that be! “We are living on the pavement next to the road, among speeding cars, where people are moving, going up and down all the time,” she tells the Al Jazeera cameraman engulfed in the pitch dark surroundings. Only the passing cars offer a glimmer of light.
“In the night we are literally sleeping between the passing people, there is nothing to protect us. I try not to close my eyes because of the constant fear around us as men are constantly roaming up and down. This is not to say anything about the stray dogs and other animals who may come our way. I have to be alert to shoo them away.”
A car can be heard skidding nearby. “I stay awake as well because my child may suddenly get up and run to the road, and if a car hits him, it really wouldn’t be the fault of the driver. So I stay awake as I don’t want anyone to hurt my children,” she concludes.
But this is hard to believe in what has become a downtrodden chaotic world.
Living in Plastic
Next the scene changes with many tents huddled one against each other, trying to do with the latest modern living the war is now offering. The Gaza Strip has become proffused with tent cities, and with those labels, there are the underdogs – those who can’t offered the proper $1000 tents but have to sleep on the margins in derelict and tiny ‘holes” made of plastic sheets and/or light material that collapse at the sight of any wind.
“It’s like living outside, you can’t call this a place of living,” another one says referring to her small, plastic tent. Here there is no toilet, we have to ask other people’s living in proper tents to ‘do our business” and at times, forcing ourselves upon them but what can we do”, her voice can filter through the camera.
“At night we remain in fear because of the stray dogs who remain amongst us, howling between our tents. This is not to say anything about the creepy-crawlers and snakes. At night I beg my neighbors to let my two grown up daughters sleep in their tent while I remain with my other small children here, but it’s really a struggle.”
Her life has long become a complete misery. “At night my children freeze because there are no blankets, we barely have thin sheets to use as cover, there are no clothes here, we simply don’t have anything, they have to go bare foot, there are no shoes, not even sandals or flip-flops for them to wear.
There is neither food, nor drinks, we stay hungry all day except for the one-day meal the kids bring from the food charities the kids queue for. After that one meal, we wait for the following day hoping to be fed.”
Dry bread Sprinkled With Salt
“How can I describe the place, it’s bad,” says a haggard old man with a beard that keeps getting longer. “We have no tent to sleep in, winter is setting in and the rain is likely to lead to our death, first it was the scorching sun, God only knows how we survived then, now the winter is upon us, we just wait for the worse, the drenching rains, life is a constant challenge,” he says amidst the dirt-soil.
Even the water is hard to come, and this is for everyone, the rugs you see here were given to us by people whose situation is really no better than us. In terms of food, as God is my witness, the bread I have here from my feed, I collected, it’s dry and hard that has been sprinkled with salt. When I am hungry, I wet it with the available water and eat. This is how we try to survive in Gaza today.”
These are a few of the voices from Gaza. For them, life has long become miserable. Here, they speak out of their dreary lives that have become a constant struggle for survival.
Dr Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Amman, Jordan
13 October 2025
Source: countercurrents.org