The author working from home in Gaza. Photo: Seraj Sbaih

In Gaza, you don’t schedule your work — no 8 to 10 a.m. for this task, 10 a.m. to 12 noon for the next. The electricity decides. The internet connection decides. You take what comes and you run with it.

The other day, this is what my day looked like. When the electricity finally came, I plugged in fast and started to work on a draft of an article that was still open on my laptop. Three days before I had interviewed families living in tents, writing about what winter does to people with nothing between them and the sky. The piece was already assembled in my head, every quote in its place. All I needed was for the electricity to last long enough for the piece to become real.

I started writing for a few minutes and then my mother knocked on my door: A water truck had pulled up down the street, and she needed someone to go fill up some water containers. I saved the draft and closed the laptop. When I came back half an hour later, the generator was cut off again. 

I work as a freelance journalist and translator, skills that are valued somewhere other than here. Freelancing isn’t a career choice in Gaza, it is what happens when every other door has closed. The problem existed long before the war. Prior to October 2023, about 65 percent of jobs were in the informal sector; for those aged 20-24 years, the unemployment rate was 72 percent. In other words, a generation of Gazans had no economy to absorb them.

The war made this dismal condition permanent. I spent years building skills around my degree — a journalist’s eye, a writer’s hunger for other worlds, and a translator’s ear. The only market that recognizes what I have built exists somewhere I cannot go. So I send the work instead. The work travels; I don’t.

I always wanted to be a dentist. It seemed like the sensible path because it offers a stable career. But English was what I actually loved. So when I finished high school, I chose to study English literature; I wanted to communicate with the world, to travel, to finally stand somewhere other than here.

I enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza and planned to keep going, to enroll in a university somewhere abroad and earn a master’s degree and hear English spoken by natives, to stop reading a literary tradition from the outside and finally live inside it. I wanted to go to England and then to Italy and Switzerland. I have never spoken to a person who wasn’t from Gaza, never seen mountains, never stood in a forest. Studying English literature was supposed to change that. 

Then the war came, and that version of my life was no longer a possibility. What I had instead was a degree, a laptop, and skills that meant nothing inside Gaza and everything outside it. So I did what made sense. I started freelancing.

I had a freelance job a few weeks ago to review and correct the Arabic translation of a client’s English content to help enhance its quality for Arabic-speaking audiences. The work was there, but so were the obstacles. The client sees a well-structured email, a delivered file, a met deadline. He doesn’t see what it took to get there. He doesn’t know that I plan my work around a generator schedule the way other people plan around meetings. He doesn’t know that my internet connection drops without warning, that I’ve learned to save drafts compulsively, even mid-sentence, because losing work to a blackout is not a risk I can afford.

He doesn’t know that the room I work in isn’t quiet, that I live next to a school now flooded with displaced people and the noise never stops, that outside there is always something — an argument, bombings, and bullets even during a nominal ceasefire. He doesn’t know any of this because I don’t tell him. My job is to make the distance between his world and mine invisible. Most days, I can.

Once, I found a job on Upwork and applied for it; I attached some work samples. Before the interview I called the man who owns the generator on our street and asked him to keep it running for at least two hours. He said he couldn’t promise anything, that isn’t how it works.

So, I went to the interview anxious. It went well until the client’s video froze. My heart stopped. I looked up, the light was still on, but the internet was gone. I spent 10 minutes on the phone with the service provider, restarting the router, watching the seconds pass.

When I finally rejoined the meeting the client was still there, but something had shifted. He had an idea of what Gaza meant, a place so damaged that human beings couldn’t take homes, electricity, internet, or basic rights for granted. He wasn’t completely wrong. At the end he told me the role required availability at all times. I understood what he meant. I didn’t get the job, not because of my skills, but because of my coordinates.

If the author worked in a coworking hub, it would cost him more than he earned. Photo: Islam Aljammaly

Some days I think about going to a work hub. A small room with electricity, Wi-Fi, and a desk. Somewhere quiet enough to think without managing everything else at the same time. But it would cost most of what I make.

In mid-September 2025, during the mass evacuation of northern Gaza, the generators were cut and the bombardment was constant. My family decided to stay. So I stayed, and I kept working. I was writing about a couple from the Husari family who had lost their four children in an attack on their building in early September. It was the hardest interview I had ever done. I couldn’t fathom how the parents could raise children for over a decade, a family’s entire source of pride and joy, gone in a single strike.

For five hours, I sat head down in a neighborhood café, working from interview material I had on my phone, documenting their grief, trying to do the story justice. When I finished, I went to speak to the owner. I had forgotten my wallet and needed to return with the money. He nodded. I came back to my table to pack my things and noticed my phone and charger were gone. I searched like a man who had lost his mind. Under the table, around the chairs, back to the owner, back to every corner of the room. My work was on that phone. My pictures. My memories. Gone. 

I went home and told my family. They took it quietly. With everything around us, the evacuation, the bombardment, the Husari parents and their four children, a stolen phone was not the biggest loss of the day. But I never went back to a café to work. Now I stay home, manage the generator, manage the noise, manage everything.

I chose English because it felt like a passport. And it was, but not for me. My words go where I can’t. My work lands in inboxes in cities I have never seen, gets read by people who will never know what it takes to send it. 

Once, I translated 100 stories written by elementary school children in Saudi Arabia. The children’s Arabic teacher wanted to show the world the students’ imagination and creativity. I spent weeks inside those stories, written by children about worlds they had actually seen, places they had actually been, lives lived without rubble underfoot or a sky that brings death.

I translated every word carefully, faithfully, and sent the stories off. I didn’t know how to feel about the text I worked on. The closest I can name it is envy, though I’m not sure that’s the right word. I am envious of children and stories that get to travel and of anyone whose imagination is the only passport they need.

This article is co-published with Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.