Life in Gaza is a series of calculations. How much water do you really need?

My phone battery is on 30%. My laptop died a few days ago. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep communicating with the outside world. I’ve been able to charge my phone until now because someone in the neighbourhood had a generator. For two hours a day he would let people charge their phones on it – he wouldn’t accept any money. Money doesn’t mean anything any more anyway. You can’t buy fuel. Now my neighbour has run out of fuel for his generator.

Life is an endless series of calculations. Such as: how much water do you really need? I moved my family away from air strikes in the north of Gaza city to my uncle’s two-bedroom flat after the war started. There are 17 of us living here now. When we ran out of bottled water I had to walk 5km to an outpost run by an aid agency, pick up the ration, which was three gallons per family, and carry it home. Being on the streets is dangerous. So we try to go to the outpost just once every few days, even though we don’t have very much water.

One of our neighbours had spare water from his father’s well. When people started to run out he drove a giant bottle of water around on a donkey cart, giving it away to people. I offered to pay him but he refused to accept money, even though he’s from a poor family. A couple of days ago he stopped – he’d run out of fuel to draw water from the well.

My male relatives and I go out each morning to see if any supermarkets are open so we can buy tinned food. We each try to go to a different supermarket so that if one is hit by an air strike we will minimise the loss to the family. We zigzag through the streets like ants. Sometimes we have to climb over the rubble of a bombed house to get to a shop. You don’t know if the bodies of the people who were sheltering there have been pulled out – you could be stepping over their graves. These people thought they had a future.

Most of the air strikes are concentrated in the north at the moment, though a blast near us the other day blew our windows out. We had to carry my cousin to hospital to get the glass taken out of his leg. Now we just have blankets for windows and the nights are cold.

My two-year-old son is scared by the sound of explosions at night. My wife and I tell him it’s fireworks for Eid, and that the next day we’re going to take him out in a special outfit for the celebrations. You can’t really tell a toddler that he might be killed any minute.

What bothers us is that the outside world seems to be getting used to this. We feel we have no shield. People get up in the morning hoping to make it until the evening, and they go to sleep at night hoping to wake up the next day.

My battery is on 29%. ■

Mohammad R. Mhawish is a Palestinian journalist in Gaza city. Find him on Twitter/X @MohammRafik

Photographs: Getty, Eyevine, Alamy