Ahmed Shafqa, a 4-year-old orphan, at the camp for displaced people where he lives with his brother Muhammed, 8, in Gaza in September. Two years of intense warfare in Gaza have left its people with a dismembered and disordered society. The destruction is vast and many Gazans have mental and physical wounds that could scar a generation. Photo / Saher Alghorra, The New York Times
The pallets of aid dropped from the plane, their parachutes popping as they fell to the battered and hungry people of the Gaza Strip below.
On the ground, most people in the seaside strip have been forced from their homes into a fraction of the territory.
Living in tent camps, they struggle to find food, water and medicine.
Many of the houses, businesses and neighbourhoods that framed their former lives have been pulverised, leaving them little to return to whenever the war might end.
In the two years since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has unleashed tremendous military might in Gaza, causing destruction that has few parallels in modern warfare.
The result is a dismembered and disordered society.
Entire branches have been lopped off family trees, with more than 67,000 killed, or one in every 34 Gaza residents, according to local health officials.
Last month, a United Nations commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel denies the accusation, saying it seeks to destroy Hamas and return the hostages taken in the group-led attack that killed 1200 people.
Israeli and Hamas negotiators have been holding talks in Egypt about a possible swap of Israeli hostages in Gaza for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Such an agreement could push forward a new plan laid out by United States President Donald Trump to end the war after many failed attempts.
It remains unclear who — if anyone — would govern the territory or pay for reconstruction to restore the lives of the people of Gaza.
In the meantime, most are too busy surviving to ponder the future.
“The thinking about life after the war comes only when the war ends,” said Hamza Salem, a former service station attendant who lost both legs during heavy Israeli bombardment early in the conflict.
Damaged bodies, upended lives
Before the war, Salem lived in northern Gaza with his wife and children, three sons and a daughter, Rital. She was 5, liked to make beaded bracelets and had just started kindergarten.
“Life was moving, praise God,” Salem said.
The war changed everything.
An Israeli strike during the war’s early weeks hit near Rital, severing her right arm above her wrist, according to Salem and his father, Abdel-Nasr Salem, who was injured in the same attack. The Israeli military said it struck Hamas military infrastructure.
Three months later, after the family had fled to southern Gaza, another strike hit near Salem, and he had to have both legs amputated above the knee, he said.
Both have struggled to get treatment as Gaza’s health system has collapsed.
Israeli forces have repeatedly evacuated, raided and struck hospitals, accusing Hamas of using them for protection.
Fewer than half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are partly functional, the World Health Organisation says.
As the war progressed, medicine ran short and cancer treatments and dialysis became scarce.
After Israel blocked all aid from entering Gaza this northern spring, hunger spread.
In August, a group of global experts declared that more than half a million people in Gaza were experiencing a “man-made” famine whose effects included starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
Malnutrition and trauma can hamper mental and physical development, experts say, meaning the health effects of the war could echo through a generation.
“There is an ever-present threat of illness and death which children are having to battle with every day,” said Tess Ingram, the Unicef spokesperson in Gaza.
“This creates a level of toxic stress that is not just harmful, but potentially life-threatening long term.”
Israeli officials have played down the severity of hunger in the enclave, saying they work to facilitate the entry of aid into the territory. The Government has called the famine report “an outright lie”.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it strikes only military targets and adheres to international law.
It accused Hamas of building military infrastructure — including command centres, weapons depots, and combat tunnels — in densely populated civilian areas as well as booby-trapping roads and civilian homes.
More than a quarter of the 167,000 Palestinians in Gaza who have been wounded have sustained “life-changing injuries,” the World Health Organisation says. More than 5000 have lost limbs.
With the borders sealed by Israel, people cannot readily flee the enclave to seek safety from the bombardment, as refugees from Syria and Ukraine did.
The wounded cannot easily seek care abroad because permissions for medical evacuations are hard to obtain.
Rital’s severed arm was lost in the chaos of the strike that injured her, so it could not be reattached, Salem said. Because of shortages at the hospital, he had to buy anaesthesia and medications from nearby pharmacies.
The blast that wounded him also knocked him unconscious, Salem said. He woke up 10 days later to find that he had no legs.
Inadequate sanitisation led to an infection, he said, and he was later discharged with no medication, leaving him to cope with the pain.
The family fled again in September after Israel launched a new assault on Gaza City, he said. They went by foot to central Gaza, his father and sons struggling to push his wheelchair on damaged and sandy streets.
The family is now sheltering at his sister’s house, Salem said, but they have few clothes, little money and no tent to sleep in should they have to flee again.
“We have no other place to go,” he said.
Ravaged communities
The United Nations estimates that nearly four out of five buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.
As of last December, the UN said there were more than 50 million tonnes of rubble, so much that 105 trucks would take 21 years to remove it.
In February, the World Bank priced the physical damage at US$29.9 billion ($52b) — 1.8 times the annual economic output of Gaza and the West Bank.
The numbers do not capture all that is lost. Erase enough of the landmarks in someone’s daily life — the shop where they bought tomatoes, the cafe where they met with friends — and that life fades away.
For Nidal Eissa, a father-of-three who owned a bridal shop in Gaza City, life centred around the apartment building he shared with about 30 relatives.
It is now in ruins, satellite imagery shows, as is the orange grove down the street, his local butcher shop and the barbershop where he used to take his son.
His family’s building was packed with memories.
“I lived my best days and years in this home,” said Eissa, 32.
The family gathered there for milestones, he said. New babies were welcomed with sweets. Brides and grooms were feted with meals. Departed relatives were mourned with bitter coffee and dates.
His children attended nearby schools, and the family received medical care at a local clinic, all run by the UN.
His bridal shop, White Angel, was a short drive away.
Early in the war, amid intense Israeli bombardment, a strike on a nearby truck damaged his shop, he said. He salvaged as many dresses and accessories as he could and moved them to his apartment.
The goods were lost in August, when Israel bombed the building, according to Eissa and his cousin Walid Eissa.
The Israeli military, both men said, warned a neighbour beforehand who alerted the family. They fled the area, but the building was destroyed. The Israeli military said the strike hit “a military target”.
Suddenly homeless, his extended family scattered to find shelter. Eissa and his wife and children ended up in southern Gaza, where they sleep in a tent.
He hopes to rebuild his life in a Gaza no longer ruled by Hamas.
“If the war ends with solutions and the ruling system changes, I will open a business and stay in my country,” he said.
“Most important is that they change the regime that dragged us into ruin and destruction.”
Childhoods lost
Mahmoud Abu Shahma, 14, also lives in a crowded tent near the beach.
He spends his mornings waiting to fill up jugs of water for drinking and bathing. He makes tea on a wood fire and eats bread sprinkled with spices — or whatever else he can find to fend off hunger.
The rest of the day, he wanders around the camp where he lives. He has been out of school for more than two years.
“No one has asked me to study,” he said. “If there was a school, I would go.”
His parents cannot fill the void because they were both killed, leaving him among the many thousands of orphans created by the war.
The conflict has all but done away with conventional childhood. Children have been wounded and killed, lost loved ones and endured prolonged deprivation.
“You are creating extremely difficult conditions for mental, human and physical recovery,” said Tareq Emtairah, the director general of Taawon, a Palestinian charity that supports orphans.
In April, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, part of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, said that more than 39,000 children had lost at least one parent in the war. Of those, some 17,000 had lost both.
Shahma lives in one of seven tent camps in southern Gaza that house more than 4000 children who have lost at least one parent.
An additional 15,000 rely on the camps for food, medical care and other services, said Mahmoud Kallakh, who manages the camps.
Aid workers say many of the children have frequent nightmares or anxiety. Some have been through such extreme mental or physical anguish that they have stopped speaking.
The education system has crumbled even for children whose families remain intact.
More than 700,000 children lack formal schooling, and nearly all schools need rehab or reconstruction, according to Unicef.
All universities are closed, many of them destroyed by Israeli forces who accused Hamas of operating inside them.
Ad hoc schools have popped up in camps for displaced people, where children gather under tarps and sit on the ground.
Mayasem, an arts and culture organisation, runs a school in southern Gaza that offers classes in Arabic, English, maths and science.
One student, Rateel al-Najjar, 8, said that she was happy to be studying again, but that the school lacked chairs, crayons, notebooks and pencils.
She loves maths, she said, and wants to be an architect like an uncle of hers who was killed in the war.
Najla Abu Nahla, the executive manager of Mayasem, said the school focused less on academic achievement and more on fun, sports and music to support the children’s mental health.
When classes end, she said, they do not want to go back to waiting in line for food or fetching water.
“Here,” she said, “they can just feel like children.”
An economy in tatters
Before the war, Mona al-Ghalayini was a rare woman who had worked her way into Gaza’s business elite.
She co-owned a supermarket and owned and managed an eatery called Big Bite and the upscale Roots Hotel, which rose next to the marina on Gaza City’s Mediterranean coast.
Little remains of her holdings.
The supermarket? “Burned and looted,” she said by phone from Egypt, where she fled early in the conflict.
Big Bite? “Also gone.”
The hotel? “It needs to be completely restructured.”
Last year, she opened a Palestinian restaurant, Jouzoor, in Cairo. She thinks about returning to Gaza, someday, but said it must have stability, running water and electricity — what she called “the components of life”.
She cannot anticipate when that might be.
“There is no clear vision for anything that you can build on,” said al-Ghalayini, 55. “The future is not clear for anyone.”
Gaza before the war was poor, a condition exacerbated by a partial Israeli-Egyptian blockade aimed at weakening Hamas.
But Palestinians in Gaza with means invested in shopping centres, restaurants, factories and farms that helped feed and employ the population.
The war halted nearly all formal economic activity, and unemployment is at least 80%, according to the World Bank.
The conflict has undermined the ability of people in Gaza to feed themselves, with more than 70% of irrigation wells, greenhouses and fishing boats damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations. As of July, less than 2% of cropland was both undamaged and accessible to farmers.
The share of Palestinians in Gaza living in what the World Bank calls “multidimensional poverty” — meaning the lack of access to income, education and services like electricity and clean water — is projected to increase to 98%, from 64% before the war.
The conflict has shredded the finances of many enterprising residents.
Hassan Shehada, 61, once employed more than 200 workers who sewed jeans, jackets and other clothing, much of it to be sold in Israel, he said by phone from Gaza.
During the war, one workshop with 60 sewing machines was destroyed, he said.
When his family fled Gaza City for central Gaza, they took 20 sewing machines and other supplies with them, but they have struggled to find enough electricity to put them to use.
So he cannot work or go home and tries to keep up with reports about former employees who have been killed.
Still, he hopes that peace will come and that the people of Israel and Gaza will realise that their fates are intertwined.
“Israel can’t give up on us, and we can’t give up on Israel,” he said. “If there is no real peace built on solid foundations between us, nothing will work.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ben Hubbard, Bilal Shbair and Iyad Abuheweila
Photographs by: Saher Alghorra, Diego Ibarra Sanchez
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES