A Gaza teacher describes job losses, famine and displacement in endless struggle

A teacher in Gaza City says her family has lost its income, lived through famine and now shares an apartment with relatives, 11 people in all. She describes the struggle as an endless battle. The account is a first-person essay published by Countercurrents under the headline "Life is an endless battle in Gaza".

The writer says that when she got engaged in 2021, her husband Ahmad was an English teacher with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, earning $900 a month. She taught seventh and eighth graders at a government-run school on al-Jalaa Street in Gaza City for $400 a month. Countercurrents published her account of how those jobs, and her family's home, were lost. She wrote that she now lives in an apartment near the Abu Mazen roundabout in Gaza City, and that this November will mark a year of living there. Eleven people from three branches of her husband's family live under the same roof, each family unit sharing a room, she wrote. They share the kitchen, the bathroom and all expenses, which she put at around $750 a month for all the families combined, including rent, water, electricity and food.

How we got here

• 7 October 2023: The writer says everything changed on this date. The Gaza government could only pay $260 every 50 days, and UNRWA let go of its contract employees, including her husband. Through the rest of 2023 and 2024, she wrote, the family relied on savings, online work and humanitarian assistance, and she sold her gold jewelry, including a gold ring from her husband.
• December 2023: The family's home in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, was destroyed, she wrote.
• February 2025: After a lengthy period of displacement in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, she returned to her family home in Tel al-Hawa, south of Gaza City. She wrote that it was severely damaged, with half of it on the verge of collapse. She lived there with her in-laws and her child, while her husband remained in the north.
• March to October 2025: The family lived through the famine in Tel al-Hawa, she wrote. She said they spent months eating only lentils, pasta and rice, and that vegetables and a can of tuna were a luxury. She was pregnant during this period.
• June 2025: Her husband was teaching again by this month, she wrote, working long hours for little money. Around the same period she gave birth to their second baby. She said he went two months without pay during what she called Gaza's cash crisis, which she wrote continues to this day, and that cash brokers sometimes demanded a $100 transfer before handing over $50 in cash. He chose to stay home to care for the newborn and support her.