Gaza has long been described as an “open-air prison.” The more I reflect on the term, the more it feels like a painful truth rather than mere hollow rhetoric. A suffocating blockade has been imposed for decades, with two border crossings sealed shut depending on the political climate and circumstances, often leaving no feasible exit for patients seeking medical referrals or students hoping to travel, while insufficient commercial supplies are allowed in. Yet in the middle of it all, Palestinians’ gleaming and enduring minds keep innovating passionately, frantically renovating what has been broken, and exploring new forms of survival that seem to be unlocked only in Gaza. All of it is an attempt to cope, to reclaim a life that, quite simply, we have been coercively denied.

In the Al-Taghreba shelter in Khan Younis, the displaced refused to let the rituals of Ramadan die. But lavish lanterns and colorful decorative garlands were distant dreams for many, given the financially draining ramifications of two years of genocidal war, which have left most people in Gaza unable to create the traditional festive ambience of the holiday. Yet they made their own, shadowed by a stark reminder of how fragile the status quo remains, nonetheless still glowing with a certain joy amid the relative calm. Slicing through the surfaces of piled-up cola cans, people have turned them into decorations that mimic the shape of lanterns, recycling environmentally harmful waste into simple yet radiant lanterns that hung between the tents. Seeing them, I was astonished. The people there, who had been stripped of everything but their hospitality and dignity, immediately offered to make me one too.

Recycling in Gaza is not pursued mainly for the sake of environmental sustainability. It is an obligatory necessity, forced on us by harsh living conditions. During the genocide, when cooking gas severely dwindled and wood for cooking was running critically low, one innovative man in our neighborhood devised another practical, energy-saving tool from discarded food tins. He used a large tin can, cutting a circular opening in its surface to create a space to insert pieces of wood, and another on the side connected to a fan that helped the flames spread faster. It was powered by an external source of energy — a battery. To operate it, one would first strike a flame and place it on the wood, then turn on the battery to run the fan. My father has bought us many, one after the other, as the fan would eventually melt down from intensive use.

One displaced Gazan, Dalia Alafifi, managed to turn heaps of cans into a shelter that protected her and her family from the scorching sun and the frost of winter, following a sketch drawn by a brilliant Gazan architect. Meanwhile, Motaz Barzaq, a Palestinian who once lived in a smart home in northern Gaza supported by cutting-edge technologies that facilitated his life, was forcibly displaced and found himself stranded on the seashore, like hundreds of thousands of others in Gaza. Barzaq decided to defy all odds and return to the traditional ways of living once adopted by our ancestors. He took advantage of the sea sand, filling it into sacks to serve as the scaffolding of his hut, layered the sacks with mud, and created a roof covered with tiles. Barzaq mentioned that it took him 2,000 sand-filled sacks and one month to finish it. Yet later on, I learned that his striking innovation could not withstand the sea waves.

Many Palestinians in Gaza, if not all, are stitching the fragments of life, belongings, homes, and memories together. I passed by a damaged house in Khan Younis where only the second floor is half-intact, hanging in the air, while the third and ground floors are hollowed out and the stairs are broken. But there is nowhere for the home’s inhabitants to flee, so they improvised an outside ladder to reach the second floor after clearing away the rubble. A recent report showed that more than 60 million tons of rubble still clog Gaza’s war-ravaged streets, including neighborhoods like mine, where many of my brother’s friends live. Their journey starts here. They filter through the rubble with their bare hands — as reconstruction equipment has generally not been allowed to enter Gaza yet — separating concrete, plastic, and wood from one another. They extricate metal for remodeling and crush concrete and stones into gravel, which can be reused in the reconstruction of other buildings.

Fuel — benzene, solar, and kerosene — has been largely unavailable, compounding our people’s suffering in urgent situations of displacement or medical emergencies. As fuel is a pillar of life, Gazans have been forced to produce alternative sources of energy that are often crude and harmful to their health, mainly by burning plastic. The available means of transportation are also far from sufficient to meet the needs of such densely populated areas. Many vehicles have been damaged, burned, or rendered unusable. Drivers have turned to improvisation, attaching wooden pallets with wheels to vehicles, or relying on animal-drawn carts to accommodate the ever-growing demand for transport.

With Gaza’s medical infrastructure obliterated, recycling has become a lifeline for patients with life-threatening conditions. A pharmacist named Khalid Aouda, along with his wife, who is a physician, turned their tent and their kitchen tools into a makeshift medical laboratory. Relying on standard medical guidelines and a kitchen blender, they transform oral pills into liquid drugs to best fit children, disabled people, and the elderly, as their requisite medications were not accessible. For Ibrahim Said, a 33-year-old man who lost his leg as a result of an Israeli shooting while he was desperately seeking humanitarian aid, life became an endless loop of struggle with no salvation in sight as prosthetic limbs remained inaccessible. So he made his own. Using sewage pipes and aluminum pieces, he crafted an ingenious way to stand again and provide for his family. Elsewhere, Dr. Fadel Naim, an orthopedic surgeon and current acting head of Al-Ahli Hospital, has created a remarkable breakthrough: a 3D-printed external fixator device for complicated fracture cases that have become common due to the genocide. It was innovated from recycled simple materials — metal rods, nuts, and bolts — and powered by solar panel energy.

Even clothes have been fashioned from recycled old blankets to offer warmth in displaced tents when temperatures plummeted. Meanwhile, much of the footage circulating on social media from Gaza was not captured using professional equipment, but by innovative minds — reporters and content creators — who improvised with simple means, replacing camera drones, which are prohibited from entering Gaza, with their phones mounted on boom handles.

Recycling is not only spawned out of genocide. It is a decades-long coping mechanism, imprinted in our souls, and renewed each time we recycle the remnants of our lives after every aggression unleashed on our home. Recycling has become a part of our identity as Palestinian Gazans. Our resilience and creativity should be etched in history to offer a model for conflict-zone areas, disaster-affected regions, and climate-vulnerable communities — not just for Gaza, but for the world.

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