On March 26, I gave a training to women living in one of the displacement camps in Gaza City on how to cope with the psychological pressure they’ve endured as a result of the war. I gave them some exercises to help them calm down—an important skill for everyone, since some people had developed chronic illnesses from being constantly and overwhelmingly nervous. They told me their stories of how they had survived “fire belts”—relentless waves of simultaneous aerial and artillery bombardments across a specific strip of land, designed to level entire residential blocks and neighborhoods—and how the post-war period was shaping up to be worse than the war itself due to the trauma they have all endured.
During our discussion session, one of the women told me that her problem was with the tent itself. “How can I accept this reality?” she asked. Many women interjected, mentioning the same problem. In the winter, their tents flooded with water; in the summer, they trapped so much heat it felt like they were living in the flames of hell. And now, they were facing a new problem: more and more rats were appearing in the camps.
The tents most people use for shelter in Gaza have no doors, and rats can easily sneak in through the soft sandy ground, particularly at night. To make matters worse, stinging and poisonous insects have been following the rats onto the beach and into tents. No matter how many rats they caught, the women said, even more appeared. They worried for their children: Some of them would wake up in a panic in the middle of the night, worried a rat may have attacked their child.
Three days after I gave my training, people throughout the camp woke up in the middle of the night to screams. Adam Al-Ostaz, a twenty-nine-day-old infant, had been bitten by a rat.
“The terrifying intensity of the screaming woke me from my sleep, along with all the neighboring tents, to find my infant’s face covered in blood from having been bitten,” Youssef Al-Ostaz, his father told me, adding that he then saw “the rat fleeing the tent.”
Youssef took Adam to the hospital, where he was briefly held for observation. The doctors warned him that while the injury was fortunately treated in time, a rat bite can be fatal for a newborn due to the high risk of infection. They noted that without such immediate care, the wound could have left permanent scars or led to life-threatening complications.
I’m not telling you this story simply to add another individual tragedy to the enormous archive of recorded suffering in Gaza. The rat infestation is emblematic of the many ongoing structural disasters we are currently facing: the spread of trash and waste, the collapse of sewage networks, and the decomposition of corpses.
Before October 7, 2023, I used to walk down Rashid Street on Gaza’s coast before making my way to the beach, taking deep breaths, jotting down my thoughts, and writing letters to myself. In March, I returned to that spot along the coast for the first time since the war, hoping for a moment of meditation on a patch of sand.
But the coast was now covered in tents, and I couldn’t find a single spot to sit. There were tents as far as the eye could see. Between the tents were sewage waste, trash, bugs, and kids playing in the dirty sand. The tents were worn out and stuck together, and people were practically living on the street with their possessions. As I walked along the coast, I felt a familiar anxiety, a sadness unlike any other.
The scene brought back memories of my own life in a tent. My family and I were forced to flee our home in western Gaza in September 2025, after it was bombed and the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood was invaded. We spent weeks displaced in a tent in the south of the Strip, where I used to weep, feeling a desperate nostalgia for the privacy I had lost. After the ceasefire was announced in October 2025, my family returned north. Today, we live right next to the rubble of our destroyed home.
I kept walking down Rashid Street, heartbroken. I passed what had once been Gaza’s most opulent hotels with views of the port. They’ve since been transformed into gathering places for tents, where displaced people seek shelter in the remnants of the hotels’ walls. The Roots Hotel now houses dozens of displaced people in its remaining debris, and the Deira Hotel has been converted into a camp for refugees. How could Israel cause such destruction here that the most many Palestinians in Gaza dare to hope for is waterproof tents in the winter and the remnants of a wall for shade in the summer? For years now, Israel has been engineering death of all kinds: death from fire belts, death from hunger, death from the cold, and now, death from rat attacks.
Before the war, Gaza’s beach was our only escape. With no mountains and a suffocating blockade, Gaza City’s seaside promenade and its cafes were our campground, our tourist haven, our breathing room. Families walked the shore at sunset; hotels like Roots welcomed visitors. Gaza City was famous for its people’s love for fishing and the sea. Today, thousands of those landmarks lie in rubble. Gaza has lost not just homes but also the last fragments of normal life. The sea remains Gazans’ only refuge, and we rely on it now more than ever.
In Gaza, environmental degradation is more than bad smells and rodents scuttling through tents—it’s an effort to crush people’s spirits. It also prompts an existential question: Why are we destined to endure such agony to the extent that some view death as a haven from the hell of a life devoid of everything?
As I walked along the shore, the same sea that offered me a temporary refuge felt like a silent witness to a collective grief that is only now beginning to surface. The women that I talked to in the camp aren’t just fighting rats. They are fighting the realization of everything we have lost. In these moments of relative quiet, the true weight of the damage becomes clear. It is not just in the rubble of our homes but in the exhausted eyes of mothers who, after surviving the bombs, now find themselves defending their children’s sleep against the ruins of a broken world.