Reporter’s notebook: In Gaza, days of ingenuity, nights of doubt

Ghada Abdulfattah has been without electricity since Day 1 of the war in Gaza. Yet she has never missed a deadline in her work for The Christian Science Monitor.

Her home has been hit twice by artillery and tank fire, most recently demolishing the kitchen and damaging part of her niece’s bedroom. Yet even amid efforts to move her family to safety, she has never stopped thinking about the Monitor, either. How she can help. Where she should go. What she can do.

Reporting in Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war is a daily demonstration of the remarkable capacity of the human spirit. Every task, a feat of ingenuity and determination.

“Each morning, I run to my neighbors, who have solar panels installed on their roofs, to charge my laptop, power bank, and phones,” Ghada tells me by WhatsApp. “On occasion, I am fortunate enough to use their internet connection as well. I make sure to vary the neighbors I approach so as not to burden any one individual.”

Mornings are also for gathering water and baking bread on cast iron pans over an open fire. Evenings are spent huddled around the radio, trying to conserve battery power on mobile phones. Nights are filled with the buzzing of drones, the thump of tank fire, the crash of airstrikes  – the sounds of uncertainty woven into every waking moment.

By the calendar, it has been a month and a half since the war began, but “It feels like it has been forever,” Ghada’s sister tells her. “With everything being damaged,” Ghada says, days draw out in “the need to resort to outdated methods to carry out even the most basic tasks.”

The first time her home was hit by artillery fire, Ghada helped moved her family south to Rafah, farther from the eye of the war. Her family of 12 packed into a taxi built for four.

Two weeks later she returned home, grateful the damage was not too bad and hopeful the family could rebuild once the war ended. Then last weekend, tank fire hit the building while Ghada and her mother and father were in the courtyard baking. The kitchen was gone.

Again, the family packed into taxis – three this time. One had no windows and smelled strongly of the cooking oil being used as fuel. And again, Ghada and her family are now in Rafah and Khan Yunis, scattered across multiple houses.

As a journalist, Ghada’s job is to find answers. But she returns to her family every day vexed by what she does not know, cannot know. “When will it end?” asked the mothers she interviewed for a powerful article in the Monitor about how families in Gaza were coping.

Ghada cannot say. “I have no more answers than I did since the first day of the war.” 

You can see more of Ghada’s reporting by following this link.