The current Israel-Gaza war began on Oct. 7, 2023, with the Hamas attack on Israel that killed approximately 1,200 people, followed by 538 days and counting of Israel’s indiscriminate military assault and siege on Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people — although the true number could be higher still. A study published in the Lancet last month used multiple data sources to estimate mortality due specifically to traumatic injury for the period from Oct. 7 2023, to June 30, 2024, at 64,260 deaths, while an earlier, conservative measure of indirect deaths resulting from the war estimated at least 186,000 total deaths over the same period.
Throughout all this, Palestinians who have survived in Gaza until now have lived out the adage that necessity is the mother of invention.
After the ceasefire that took effect Jan. 19, 2025, daily life remained unfathomably difficult in every possible way, but Gazans continued to demonstrate constant ingenuity and persistence as they set about reclaiming a devastated landscape and working to make it liveable again. While President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traded plans for the future of 2.3 million people who are neither American nor Israeli, Palestinians in Gaza focused on rebuilding a land they have no plans to leave. They did so despite regular violations of the ceasefire that resulted in 150 Palestinians being killed in Israeli attacks during this truce.
Yet earlier this month Israeli ministers called for the "gates of hell" to be reopened in Gaza and Israel reimposed its blockade, preventing food, fuel, medicine, medical aid and vital supplies from entering the enclave and preventing medical evacuations. The siege had caused a new famine by the time that Israel, acting with U.S. consent, torpedoed the ceasefire with dozens of simultaneous strikes by hundreds of warplanes. As of Friday, nearly 900 people, mostly children, had been killed this month, during Ramadan as further strikes on every part of Gaza continue to kill dozens every day and injure many more.
The Israeli army has again issued evacuation orders, forcing half-starved, exhausted, multiply-displaced survivors on the move again in an impossible search for safety. That makes it all the more remarkable how Gazans have adapted to unfathomable conditions no one should have to face. They will play such a significant and positive a role in the world — if only they are "allowed" to live. If survivors can gain access to necessary resources and opportunities and autonomy, the future could still be very bright.
Israel is globally known as a technology powerhouse. But despite decades of scholarship on the matter, it’s less generally recognized that Israel has often first employed that technology to control Palestinians' movements and to enforce a blockade of goods and raw materials extending over decades, in a process of induced impoverishment that has been described as "de-development" by the United Nations. Despite the immense suffering the blockade has caused, the lack of access to supplies and restrictions on freedom of movement have forced extraordinary innovation in Gaza since well before the siege Israel imposed after October of 2023.
“The ways in which Palestinians in Gaza have been literally surviving on innovation tells me the future of engineering, medicine and technological design is going to be Gaza-born … Palestinians in Gaza keep pushing for life as the world abandons it,” wrote journalist and policy analyst Mariam Barghouti last November.
Alan El-Kadhi, the British director of Gaza Sky Geeks, told Salon from the West Bank that every one of the three large co-working and training buildings the organization (a program of Mercy Corps) operated in Gaza City and Khan Yunis, two cities in Gaza, were destroyed by Israeli attacks. But his staff and the Gaza Sky Geeks members who previously used those co-working spaces to launch startups, study and work in digital tech had created various co-working spaces to gather and continue their work, he said. These spaces are tents, and some people gathered in them despite daily bombardments and the constant struggle to find food and clean water for their families.
"Palestinians in Gaza keep pushing for life as the world abandons it."
"What has been amazing for me is the resourcefulness of the people there ... So you'll have a tent they kitted out. There'd be internet there with some desks," El-Kadhi said, speaking about the long months of war before ceasefire, and before the ceasefire turned into the renewed siege and blockade and then the ongoing massive military assault. "The prices of everything have rocketed, so one of the ways in which their online skills can help them is that they work online. But there was another side. People want something to do, to take [their] mind away from the awful situation they're facing every day."
University students would go to these spaces to follow their curriculum and submit schoolwork, while others used them to generate income. Still others would remotely attend Gaza Sky Geeks trainings on a wide variety of specialized digital technology skills. All who gathered in such spaces did so despite the significant risk of movement.
"As part of coping mechanisms during displacement, I used to go to a tent-like co-working space that was established by support from nonprofit organizations," Mohammad Alnajjar, Gaza Sky Geeks program support senior officer, told Salon in a direct message interview. He noted that similar places providing internet services had been targeted and bombed, even in the so-called humanitarian zone.
About a third of Gaza Sky Geeks' employees were able to escape across the border into Egypt, when that was still possible. Some have since moved on to other countries, but many live in limbo in Egypt, unable to work legally or to send their children to school. Nevertheless, this represents the loss of some of Gaza's top tech talent.
Palestinians use a donkey-pulled cart to transport their belongings as they flee Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on March 21, 2025. Gaza's civil defence agency said on March 20 that 504 people had been killed since the bombardment resumed, more than 190 of them minors. (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images)"There's been a brain drain of many of the skilled ones, because they have a little bit more income," El-Kadhi said, referring to the steep fees being charged to cross into Egypt. Others, like his Gazan colleague Alnajjar, are stuck: "When war erupted, I redirected my attention to public administration and I was accepted last year [for a Masters in Public Administration at the University of Oregon] hopefully to get ready to contribute in the rebuilding of Gaza. Unfortunately... I can't get out of Gaza to attend my visa appointment in Egypt," he wrote to Salon in a direct message interview. By January, he had been displaced from his home in the north and three further times in the south, been forced to withdraw from a remote Executive MBA program, and struggled with everything from scarcity of drinking water and nutritious food to the complete blackout of electricity and unreliable telecommunications and internet services.
Israeli forces’ destruction of virtually all structures and infrastructure in the enclave since Oct. 7 has also caused immense damage to both the human ingenuity and the physical infrastructure needed to produce innovations that the world, as well as Palestine, may need. Virtually everyone in Gaza has lost loved ones, and almost everyone has been displaced, with homes and workplaces turned to rubble. By the beginning of November 2023, less than a month into the war, Israel had dropped 25,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, the explosive weight equivalent of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the ingenuity and infrastructure that have been destroyed were only developed in the first place through, as Gaza Sky Geeks puts it on their website, "true grit." Because it's never been easy.
Getting the goods
The first 3D printer in Gaza was smuggled in as parts about 10 years ago, said Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Palestinian-Canadian emergency room physician in London, Ontario. Loubani is the founder of Glia, which designs low-cost, locally-produced alternatives to inaccessible and proprietary medical technology using 3D printing and other innovations around the world, in addition to staffing medical clinics and bringing foreign medical delegations into Gaza. While volunteering at Gaza's Shifa Hospital, Loubani noticed that international donors from one country would often provide equipment incompatible with equipment donated by another country. As a result, Gaza medical staff would be unable to use the expensive tools due to compatibility issues, or to acquire the tools to make basic repairs. Dependence on donations was, he said, one of many problems holding back Palestinian health care.
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“The big question was, why? Like why can’t we make something just as good?” Loubani recalled in a video interview with Salon in the fall. And so Glia was born. The decade of the 2010s was a time of burgeoning “maker” culture elsewhere, with 3D printers and open-source software bringing design and production within the reach of anyone. After thinking big, the new organization settled on the iconic stethoscope as its first product, ultimately validating their low-cost, open-source, repairable device as just as good as pricier alternatives.
But the impact extended well beyond the stethoscope itself. Once the first printer was up and running in Gaza, almost everything needed to make more 3D printers was available locally thanks to the devices themselves being able to print almost all the necessary parts.
“One of the cool things that we contributed to the Gaza engineering world,” Loubani said in an interview with Salon, “is that every 3D printer in Gaza for quite a while was descended from our printer. And you could trace it, you could [ask], ‘OK, well, where did you print your printer?’
“We used to collaborate with engineering classes and make it so that the engineering classes were allowed to print anything for free,” Loubani added. "And of course that got engineers really interested. And so then eventually engineers started printing other printers."
A 3D-printed stethoscope. (Courtesy of Glia)
Before long, the innovation this spawned extended beyond the field of medicine. Replacement light switch covers, Loubani said, were a popular early project for new 3D printer enthusiasts, because they were easy to print — and, for some reason, banned by Israel.
It's clearly true that Israel has strictly managed Gazans' movement of both people and goods ever since Hamas took political control of the territory in 2007, further tightening a blockade that had itself been in place since the '90s. Israel only allowed entry of goods the country considered “essential to the survival of the civilian population” of Gaza, explained Gisha, an Israeli NGO that promotes freedom of movement for Palestinians, in a 2010 FAQ. Such essentials exclude raw materials, such as plastics.
Israel also excludes "dual use" items — regular goods that could in theory have military applications, such as pipes and fertilizer needed for construction and agriculture. Industrial amounts of ordinary consumer goods like salt or margarine are banned, preventing local production using ordinary ingredients. In fact, banned goods include items as innocuous as food products, fishing rods and paper. And Israel doesn’t even justify the raw materials ban on security grounds; rather, it is “part of the policy Israel calls ‘economic sanctions’ or ‘economic warfare’, and which human rights organizations call ‘collective punishment,'” Gisha writes.
"We are putting a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it's all closed … We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly."
A 2015 report by the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development described a process of de-development and withholding of Gaza’s natural resources and ability to produce goods for export, even as equipment and goods required for repair of repeatedly destroyed infrastructure from Israeli assaults previous to Oct. 7 were also withheld. This report, like others dating back to 2009 or even going back decades, includes statements like: “No amount of aid would have been sufficient to put any economy on a path of sustainable development under conditions of frequent military strikes and destruction of infrastructure, isolation from global markets, fragmentation of domestic markets and confiscation and denial of access to national natural resources.”
Barghouti, who observed the innovation integral to survival in Gaza during the genocide, is not alone in agreeing with that assessment while also holding out hope for the future. El-Kadhi told Salon the ambitious, talented young men and women he works with in Gaza could someday power a vibrant digital economy like Estonia's. Yahya Sinwar, the deceased Hamas leader and an architect of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, likewise saw the potential for Gaza to compete with the technological ingenuity of countries like Singapore. In a 2018 interview, he asked Italian journalist Francesca Borri: “Have you seen how brilliant our youths are? Despite it all. How talented, how inventive, dynamic they are? With old fax machines, old computers, a group of twenty-somethings assembled a 3D printer: to produce the medical equipment that is barred from entry. That’s Gaza. We are not only destitution.”
While mainstream Western media describe Hamas (whose political officials are the only government in Gaza), as a terrorist organization, others — whether supportive or critical — view it as a pragmatic armed resistance movement, whose rise was inevitable given the failures of diplomacy and civil disobedience to change Israel’s de-development policies, as well as aggressive settlement policies in the occupied West Bank. With different lives, Sinwar told Borri, Gazans would live out a different future.
But access to necessary goods worsened dramatically during the war in response to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s imposition of a complete siege: "We are putting a complete siege on Gaza ... No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it's all closed … We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly," he said in one of many public statements submitted to the International Court of Justice as evidence of genocidal intent.
Through the 18 months since then, any bakeries that weren’t targeted and bombed had nothing to sell anyway, while most industry ground to a halt without fuel or electricity. The vast majority of Gaza’s population have been repeatedly displaced. Gazans were forced from their homes, and then from the homes of their families or friends where they’d taken refuge, just as Palestinians forced out of their homes took refuge with family members in Gaza generations before, resulting in an overcrowded miniature version of pre-1948 Palestine. (The current Gaza Strip represents about 1% of historical Palestine, and even before the current war about 70% of its residents were already refugees.)
Ingenuity became the currency of daily life rather than the basis of a startup business plan, the genesis of a new scientific publication or the sales pitch for a useful new product. Take the example of Mohamed Hatem, a 19-year-old bodybuilder, who worked out during the siege and war using bricks from destroyed buildings and water canisters as weights, building strength as best he could on a starvation diet.
Evacuation maps were repeatedly dropped from the sky warning residents to evacuate from a particular area, with "safe" routes and areas constantly changing, forcing 2.3 million people to participate in what has the feel of a macabre video game, or the Netflix series "Squid Game."
Gazans were urged to pick up whatever they could and rush to safe areas that were then bombed, forcing them to move yet again to shelters in what were once schools, which were then repeatedly bombed. To tents in the safe area of Mawasi, which were then bombed. To the corridors and courtyards of hospitals, which were then bombed. Children received major operations, including after their legs, crushed when their homes were bombed, had to be amputated to save their lives — often without painkillers or antibiotics.
So innovation extended to those hospitals, no longer in terms of 3D-printed equipment, but in far more basic ways. Midwives resorted to cutting the umbilical cords of newborn babies with a razor blade, the string from a facemask serving to tie them off, Glia medical aid coordinator Dorotea Gucciardo told Salon in October.
Innovation during the war
Abed El Hamed Qaradaya is the physiotherapy activity manager at Doctors Without Borders’ hospital-based clinic in Gaza, where he's worked for 17 years, facing other very serious crisis situations. But nothing compares to the rehabilitation needs he’s experienced since October of 2023.
Before, “we never see children with bilateral amputation. It’s something horrible to see, actually,” he told Salon in a phone interview in December, before the oft-abused, now shattered truce. He described how, since October 2023, he'd been faced with patients of all ages who had lost one or both legs to Israeli shells, either directly or after they were crushed under their own homes in an attack. While Qaradaya had been proud of the high quality of the equipment and treatments he offered his patients, the total siege imposed after Oct. 7 meant that much was unavailable or prohibitively expensive. It was impossible, for example, to obtain the aluminum crutches he would typically provide his patients.
Qaradaya began exploring resources in the local community, who had largely been displaced from their homes or neighborhoods, just like he and his staff. Taking standard crutch measurements from the internet, Qaradaya commissioned a local carpenter to create several prototypes for wooden crutches. The rubber material that would normally soften the grip, and the sponge around the shoulder, were replaced by rubber his team cut from old bicycle tires.
Once they had a model that was safe and could work as a replacement, they began production.
“The patients are using it. They move immediately after the injury. They can move, it’s adaptable to the community,” where, Qaradaya explained, most of the roads have been destroyed by Israeli bombing. In fact, they work better for their current conditions than the aluminum ones, he said. “So people are able to use it in a sand environment, like [our current] street environment.”
These new crutches were distributed to many people at the clinic, which at the time was seeing about a hundred patients daily, and in the community. As a result of Israeli bombings indiscriminately targeting residential areas, Qaradaya’s clinic treated and provided this new design of crutch to patients ranging in age from 2 to 60. The idea has been shared with other organizations also working with new amputees.
“All of [the patients] suffer nearly the same injury,” he said. Body trauma injuries, for those whose legs don’t require full amputation, still include multiple fractures and broken bones which need extensive rehabilitation, which is nearly impossible to provide in wartime conditions.
By July of 2024, the World Health Organization estimated, based on daily emergency medical team reports from January to May, that 22,500 people were in need of acute or long-term rehabilitation for their injuries. Thousands more were injured between July and the January ceasefire agreement, while others continued to be injured, as well as killed, by the Israel Defense Forces despite the official ceasefire.
The WHO noted in July that “while extremity injuries are the dominant injury with about 15,000 cases, there are also likely to be 3,000-4,000 [emergency amputations performed in hospital], and over 2,000 major head and spinal cord injuries, and over 2,000 major burns.” The WHO notes while it has raised its estimate to account for other amputations, those resulting from direct trauma such as being crushed or from a blast injury, anecdotal reports suggest the total number of amputations over that January to May period may be much higher.
"It’s something unusual, a tailor working inside the rehab. But we were able to create our own way."
With transportation dangerous and difficult (donkey carts often replacing motor vehicles), few patients were in a position to visit the clinic every day until their healing was well underway. Qaradaya explained that patients were therefore sent away at perhaps 75% improvement, or told to exercise at home.
He added that malnutrition complicates wound healing and rehabilitation, as most patients lacked sufficient protein in the restricted diet made necessary by Israel’s siege and blockade. Infection remains an ever-present risk for wounded patients in Gaza, as does the development of drug-resistant infections under conditions when few medicines are available.
Crutches aren’t the clinic’s only innovation. Pressure garments are an important tool for treating the tight, itchy scars left by burn injuries, also a common injury in Gaza due to Israeli forces' shelling of buildings, crowds of people seeking food, and the tents used for housing and impromptu medical clinics. Improvised outdoor kitchens can be unsafe, and this also leads to burn injuries. Pressure garments can be uncomfortable but are vital to preserve as much function as possible, as tight scars can limit movement. But the custom pressure garments Qaradaya’s clinic once provided his patients are no longer obtainable. He and his staff responded by finding a local tailor and a second-hand sewing machine, and establishing a workshop right inside the rehab facility — using spandex instead of the usual material.
“It’s something unusual, a tailor working inside the rehab. But we were able to create our own way,” providing pressure garments for 80 to 90 patients every month, Qaradaya said.
Specialized occupational therapy tools at the clinic were replaced by scavenged substitutes: buttons, small glasses, pieces of wood or pipe now help patients relearn activities of daily living. Lacking refrigerators to cool ice packs or electricity to heat hot bags for treatment, Qaradaya’s staff adapted through collaboration, using cold chain boxes, which pharmacies use to keep heat-sensitive medications cool for transport. “So we ask the pharmacy people working with us … because they have some electricity in their pharmacy, to freeze the ice pack, and then they put it in the cold chain box, send it to us every 48 hours. This box can save the temperature for 48 hours, and we can use this treatment with the patient whenever we want.”
Among the most vital pieces of equipment at Qaradaya’s rehab clinic was a 3D printer used to create plastic masks, along with software used to scan patients’ faces. Such masks help smooth and maintain function for patients who have the kind of heavy scarring that necessitates pressure garments elsewhere on the body. Many months into the war, clinic staff learned that their 3D printer survived, although the clinic itself was forced to move to a tent, like most of Qaradaya’s staff. After 14 months they were finally preparing to restart 3D printing when Qaradaya spoke with Salon in December.
Innovation after ceasefire
At the beginning of February, less than a month into the ceasefire, AP News reported that “desalination and water-collection devices, storage units, tools, tent kits, ovens, water-resistant clothing and equipment for shelter construction teams all require 'pre-approval' before entering Gaza.”
As a result, during the winter displaced survivors were camping out in ragged tents, often over the rubble of their houses, even as they continued to discover the remains of family members or strangers in the ruins. Meanwhile, the Israeli military's decisions about what to let in and what to ban remained seemingly capricious. According to the Gaza government media office, the humanitarian protocol signed as part of the ceasefire stipulated Israel allow entry of hundreds of thousands of tents and 60,000 mobile homes to house displaced people, as well as heavy equipment to clear rubble, requirements reported by both Al Jazeera and The Times of Israel, which also reported a month into the ceasefire that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was continuing to block their entry (details of the ceasefire agreement have not been published in full). At the same time, less essential items were suddenly available in markets, such as instant noodles and chocolate, which Israel once blocked from Gaza for years along with honey, instant coffee and pomegranates.
But in most fundamental ways, many Palestinians said, life remained nearly as difficult as during the full-scale war. "The situation across all [the] Gaza Strip is extremely dire because of the bad humanitarian conditions," Alnajjar told Salon during the ceasefire. "All Gazans are struggling because we are all consumed by our daily survival tasks".
And of course, some losses can’t be replaced or repaired, even if Israel had met the conditions of the ceasefire and allowed the uninterrupted flow of necessary goods. There are three categories of things essential to innovation that were all interrupted after Oct. 7.
“One was the people. Two was the stuff those people used, and three was the infrastructure in which they did the using,” Loubani told Salon. Despite all the destruction of infrastructure, historical buildings, technology, solar panels and other goods, the worst and most painful loss involves the first category.
“You know, we used to have absolutely terrible equipment and infrastructure, but the people were always top,” Loubani said. “Well, [Israel] took that away from us. We don’t have the people anymore, because they’ve been disabled, killed, just every heinous thing has been done to them.”
El-Kadhi told Salon that before the electrical blackout imposed on Oct. 8, 2023, it was typical to get just eight hours a day of electricity in Gaza. "What people would do, you know, they're very resourceful, like in any terrible situation. People might have solar panels. People would charge their batteries when the electricity was on, so they could continue to work day or night."
Like the rest of the Middle East, Gaza receives lots of sunlight, providing a perfect environment for solar power, but as of March 2024, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated, using GPS data, that 1,695 of Gaza’s solar panels, or 65% of the total, had been damaged by Israeli attacks since the previous October, with damage to 85% of solar panel capacity in the central-north Gaza region, just south of the area of North Gaza, which has been almost completely destroyed.
20 January 2024, Palestinian Territories, Rafah: Palestinians walk by a solar panel, used by some to produce electricity in the refugee camps in Rafah. Due to the worsening financial situation of the individuals and the the lack of electricity in the refugee camps in Rafah, some young Palestinian men who have solar panels are using them to run small businesses by which they allow people to fully charge their phones for around 2 Israeli shekels fee (approximately 55 US Cents). (Photo by Mohammed Talatene/picture alliance via Getty Images)
El-Kadhi said that Israel's blockade means prices are high in Gaza for all goods and services, and Palestinians in the territory cannot afford to compete internationally for digital tech work as cheap labor. Instead, they aim to compete on the basis of quality. Before Oct. 7, 2023, El-Kadhi said, "There was a feeling of optimism, because Gaza was starting to be recognized as a location for good quality people in various skills to work online."
These skills included graphic design, data engineering, data analytics, accounting, artificial intelligence and specific coding languages. Gaza tech workers also offer a high level of education (Gaza's overall literacy rate in 2023 was 98.1%), widespread fluency in English skills, and a timezone compatible for work in both Europe and North America.
Among Palestinian youth 18 to 29 years old, 230 out of every 1,000 young women held a bachelor's degree or higher in 2019, while about 130 out of every 1,000 of their male counterparts held similar degrees, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Palestinians have long been known, writes author Anne Irfan, as "the world's most educated refugees."
As Gaza's already-limited access to the outside world was further reduced during the war, the internet became a vital lifeline, allowing Palestinian journalists and citizens to share news, including real-time documentation of the relentless onslaught they have faced. Internet fundraising campaigns have allowed some families to survive as food becomes scarce and prices escalate, while Gaza Sky Geeks has provided internet access, training and help to secure remote digital tech jobs (Organizations and business around the world can help, El-Kadhi said, by hiring qualified Palestinians.)
Even before Oct. 7, the internet, like solar power, offered Gazans the prospect of independent industry and new prosperity. Just before the war, an estimated 92% of young adults in Gaza between 18 and 29 had access to the internet, and 83% owned smartphones. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, "The technology sector will be the fastest sector to restart and revive because it requires minimal resources to start, namely a laptop, electricity and the Internet."
(Courtesy of Gaza Sky Geeks)Perhaps that's why Israeli military and intelligence appear to have targeted the sector. In an October 2024 report on higher education in Gaza, Swiss Peace Foundation writes that "The scale of destruction and education obstacles caused by the Israeli onslaught has created a crisis that is far beyond what any single agency, initiative or institution could address." As of Oct. 7, 2023, there were 12 universities in the territory. Every single one has since been destroyed. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education, between Oct. 7, 2023, and Jan. 21 of this year, at least 12,381 schoolchildren and at least 903 university students had been killed, while 513 of their schoolteachers and 161 university staff members were killed over the same period.
Before Oct. 7 there were about 65 businesses in Gaza "engaged in a variety of technological fields, including software, technical equipment, consulting, technical training, communications and other subfields, operated in the Gaza Strip," as reported by the independent nonprofit Euro-Med Monitor. That report also alleges that the Israeli army has systematically targeted "dozens of programmers, information technology experts, and workers in computer engineering," killing prominent experts in AI, computer engineering, software engineering or programming with their families in targeted strikes, while also launching attacks on company headquarters. According to the organization's preliminary estimates last March, programming and IT company HQs were almost totally destroyed in the war, all technology centers were closed, and six business incubators were damaged.
"There were [many] of the people that we knew in the community had been killed, people that we knew who had tech companies," El-Kadhi said. "I knew many of the tech companies in Gaza doing tech services for different countries around the world from Gaza online, very good, successful companies. Quite a few of those amazing people have been killed, the founders of those companies."
Innovation takes many forms
There are other remarkable innovations that Palestinians in Gaza have made under immense duress, with the threat of injury or death always looming.
At one point during the past year, Loubani said, Israeli gunboats started to fire toward the area adjacent to Glia’s seaside clinic. The Glia team "built up a wall of sandbags so that patients wouldn’t be killed immediately, they’d be given a chance to survive when the Israelis started firing. That’s really a lot of being a Palestinian: Facing these situations and thinking, 'Well, how do we adapt around them?’”
The network of tunnels built under Gaza have a similarly adaptive purpose, Loubani said, well beyond their military or strategic use by Hamas fighters. Although tunnels have been used in the region since ancient times, many such underground passages were built to connect Gaza to Egypt, in order to evade Israeli control of goods and travel. Some tunnels were built in the 1980s, well before Hamas came to power, but since 2006 they have been vastly extended, both northward toward Israel and southward toward Egypt. They have clearly been used for both smuggling and military purposes, including to hold Israeli hostages seized on Oct. 7. Loubani argued that these tunnels have also allowed for the transport of fuel for Gaza’s only power plant, which is crucial for desalination of water, as well as concrete to rebuild homes and important commodities such as tea, agricultural supplies and pesticides.
It's another form of adaptation, he said. Gazans “were reacting to the situation around them by doing whatever they could to improve their situation,” an argument echoed by the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development in its 2015 report, which described the tunnels as “yet another mechanism to respond to the economic blockade of Gaza,” one that prevented the complete collapse of its economy.
With torn banknotes and certain denominations of shekels no longer accepted by merchants during the war and siege, a new cottage industry sprang up in the painstaking repair of damaged currency, as Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary reported. Or take Mohand Al-Ashram’s adaptation of music studies to incorporate the ever-present sound of Israeli warplanes overhead. As the 23-year-old singer and musician wrote on Instagram in December, before the ceasefire, “The sound of the occupation planes is trying to disturb us, but we are exploiting their sound to teach music to children in Gaza.”
In a video, Al-Ashram listens attentively and strums his oud, trying to match a “note” from the planes, while children sing the note back at him, nearly drowning out the ominous background soundtrack they are imitating. In this way they work through the musical scale.
Ingenuity for the world we face
Palestinians are certainly not the only people for whom necessity has been the mother of invention.
Bicycle ambulances improve maternity health care in Malawi. Multiple innovations in menstrual hygiene and comfort have developed in response to stigma and waste issues in rural India, such as low tech and economical machinery allowing women to run menstrual pad-making businesses. In Cuba, there’s a phenomenal market for creative repair of just about everything. As in Palestine, a high literacy rate and an educated population have tried to meet the challenges of severe resource limitations, resulting not just in an extensive DIY culture but also in government policy that privileges innovation, with the country devoting as much of its GDP to science, technology and innovation as Israel or the United States.
Because of the issues that resource-limited, underdeveloped or de-developed countries must deal with, innovation often focuses on addressing precisely the challenges most likely to loom globally in coming years, those for which progress stands to benefit large numbers of people rather than a privileged elite, and that can be achieved with scant and shared resources. Such issues include communicable diseases, water management and renewable energy.
Meanwhile, the industry and ingenuity with which the Gazans find ways to cope with reality suggest that the process of rebuilding what can be rebuilt has already begun.
Loubani has participated in multiple conferences organized by the Gaza Health Initiative, a coalition of dozens of “health care and humanitarian organizations from all over the World, united in their commitment to help the people of Gaza in providing access to quality health care service by rebuilding and strengthening Gaza’s health sector.” A platform has been established for all these organizations to contribute to restoring this critical sector. GHI conferences have taken place in the Netherlands, Lebanon and Jordan, with an Atlanta conference focused on mental health scheduled in April. The previously-burgeoning information and communications technology sector is likewise strategizing its revival, with losses, challenges and the potential and routes to rebuilding documented in a July Gaza Sky Geeks report informed by interviews with 28 ICT sector figures representing a wide variety of businesses and technology associations.
A key pillar of being a Palestinian or supporting Palestinian statehood, Loubani told Salon during some of the darkest days of war, "is being almost delusionally hopeful."
Rebuilding for independence
But Loubani warned that on the “day after” — presumably after some semi-permanent peace deal — Palestinians must retain control of their destiny. Gaza’s Ministry of Health, he said, not the WHO or other foreign organizations, must have full control over how health care funds are spent and on what priorities. This might mean choosing to rely on open-source and local solutions, for example, rather than expensive, patented systems that depend on external organizations, contracts or resources. This philosophy, he suggests, must apply to other technology and innovation needs as well.
“There will be billions of dollars spent after this war, and everybody wants a piece," Loubani said. "And the only way to ensure that people’s lives are rebuilt in a way that’s fair and equitable is to make sure that it is as democratically administered as possible so that we don’t end up like South Africa, where their constitution guaranteed the right to electricity, to water, to all this stuff, and then all of those rights were privatized away.”
This recalls the prophetic warning Naomi Klein issued with her 2007 book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." Indeed, during the ceasefire period, Donald Trump began publicly daydreaming or threatening to privatize the “prime beachfront real estate” of Gaza under American ownership and to "clean out the whole thing," explicitly proposing ethnic cleansing, before rubberstamping Israel's decision to unilaterally and violently end the ceasefire.
Displaced Palestinian children push into a queue to get a portion of cooked food from a charity kitchen in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, ahead of the iftar fast-breaking meal during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on March 9, 2025. (OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images)The question of what's prohibited or allowed into Gaza is fundamental to understand the limitations placed on technology and development in the territory, as well as the need for almost desperate innovation. It’s impossible to say exactly what’s prohibited or why, because the lists and rules are mostly unpublished and appear to change unpredictably.
Beyond concerns about losing autonomy through the use of proprietary software, there’s another obvious issue: Surveillance software and spyware have been used to enable targeted killings throughout the war. El-Kadhi notes that many members of Gaza Sky Geeks have adopted open-source software, although the organization also teaches various proprietary programs in order to help digital workers attract clients.
In medicine, however, Loubani argues for total autonomy. “That’s going to be one of the biggest points of discussion,” he said. “How do we gain our independence fully? You must have an independent medical system or nothing — like you truly have nothing if you haven’t gotten yourself independent.” He says he'd would like to see Gaza making its own medications — effectively biohacking its way to independence — and developing systems to provide medical training to many without sending future doctors away to be educated under foreign systems, in many cases under the same governments that paid for the bombs dropped on Gaza.
Of all tasks requiring ingenuity and innovation, rebuilding Gaza will perhaps be the hardest and most important.
“I’m really proud of what we did, us and the [other] people working in the rehabilitation field,” physiotherapist Qaradaya said. “Our experience in Gaza says that rehabilitation is a very important intervention that organizations and medical decision makers have to highlight in emergencies."
The first patient to receive facial scanning and burn mask treatment, after the 14-month period when Qaradaya’s rehab team was helpless to treat disfiguring facial burns, was a two-year-old child. His face was badly burned in an Israeli attack, while his mother lost both legs. Ingenuity in this context is hardly "techno-utopian," as Loubani described his early hopes for Glia. But as soon as the ceasefire was declared, survivors began returning to the ruins of their homes, clearing roads, rebuilding systems, even harvesting what was left of their crops.
A spokesperson from the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture told Mongabay that Israel destroyed about 74% of the cultivated olive area in Gaza, nearly 2.3 million olive trees, as well as the laboratory that would normally test oil quality, but that "experienced sensory taste testers" were used instead. Markets reopened despite scarce goods. After re-imposition of the siege on March 2, preventing entry of food, fuel, humanitarian aid, survivors still celebrated Ramadan although most mosques (reportedly 79%) lay in ruins and there was only canned food, at best, to break the daily fast. That perseverance and energetic response to adversity suggest, as the GSG motto implies, that, given half a chance, there's no limit to what they might achieve.
Still, the health care system struggled along, on the verge of collapse due to lack of supplies, infrastructure and personnel. Then utter chaos returned as bombs rained down on all parts of the enclave in the early hours of March 18. The ceasefire was effectively over.
This has meant still more forced displacements of starving families, more bombed refugee camps and more hospitals overflowing with critically injured people and almost no supplies. For many in Gaza, it's hard to feel hope, or to fathom why the world has not intervened to protect them after 18 months of this. And yet, as Oscar Wilde put it, even in the worst of circumstances, "some of us are looking at the stars."
Looking at the stars
In late January, Columbia University issued a statement after a graduate student inserted information about the practice of astronomy in Palestine into a set of lab notes for an astronomy course. It was an "unacceptable breach of policy," the university held, to cite scholar Jake Silver's evocative writings about the practice of astronomy in Gaza. Those writings describe what seems impossible in a tiny territory where quadcopters and drones haunt the skies, smoke from bombings and fires fills the air and even children know that death comes from the sky: a population mad about stars and eager to look at the night sky in wonder instead of fear.
In fact, before the war there was an enthusiastic amateur and professional astronomy community in Palestine, which first formed around Birzeit University in the West Bank in the early 2010s. As Silver wrote in 2020, "the wonder of the universe has seized Palestinian audiences, and the science has gone supernova over the past three years." More than 1,000 people attended the first event of a newly constructed observatory in the West Bank, while the Gaza-based Facebook group Astronomy Science currently boasts 221,000 followers. Noted physicist Stephen Hawking, a supporter of the Palestinian cause, participated in an academic boycott of Israel and endowed an astronomy chair at a university in the West Bank. There's also a UNESCO-endowed chair in astronomy at the Islamic University of Gaza. In 2010, more than 100 people showed up for Gaza's first stargazing event, which featured an International Astronomical Union-donated telescope that took four months to arrive due to the blockade. That later became a recurring public stargazing event, although its schedule was largely determined by the ever-changing security situation.
But the campus of the Islamic University of Gaza was destroyed by Israeli fighter jets on Oct. 10, 2023. University president Sufian Tayeh, a physicist who held the UNESCO astronomy chair, was killed, along with the rest of his family, in a December 2023 strike on their home in Jabalia refugee camp.
The stars are still up there, and Gazans still look.
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