A screenshot from Counter-Strike

Growing up in Gaza, my friends and I played football in the street because there was nowhere else to go. It was the closest thing for us to a playground.

The street was ours until it wasn’t. A car or a passerby would cut through the game without warning, and we’d scatter to the sides, waiting for it to pass before pulling the match back together. Someone would shout, “Keep it down or you go play somewhere else!” from a window for the loud noises we were making. My grandfather’s voice would rise above all of it, angry at the noise, saying we disturb the neighbors.

We built the field out of what we had. Two shoes for a goal. Sidewalks for lines. Behind us, a strip of sewage where the ball sometimes disappeared. We would pull it out, rub it in sand from the sidewalk, and keep playing.

The ground was rough, scattered with rocks and broken glass. You learned quickly how to run without falling. Sometimes the glass didn’t miss. But the glass didn’t stop us — it just became part of the price of the street, and we paid it without thinking.

At the end of the game, someone with long nails, usually me, would sit and pull the pieces of glass out of our feet. I often came home with scratched knees, blistered feet during summer, and dust-covered clothes. My mother would look at me and shake her head. “Street boy,” she called me. She punished me for it, again and again, until she stopped. What else was there for a child to do?

Until one day in 2013 when I was in fifth grade, a video game shop opened in my neighborhood. What I remember most were the posters hanging on its door: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi on one side, and on the other, soldiers holding guns. I stood there, staring, wondering about the world inside.

When I finally stepped in, I was stunned. The air carried the smell of fried snacks and spilled juice. Boys shouted over each other, their voices sharp and alive. I had never seen anything like it. Ten computers lined the walls, their screens glowing with the same game: Counter-Strike, a strategy-based game that involved organizing 10 people into two teams.

It felt like the door was closing behind me, and suddenly the street was gone. The noise changed. No car horns, no shouting, just the hum of old computers and boys yelling at screens. The room was crowded, hot, and alive. Someone pressed a keyboard hard; another leaned forward like the game could hear him. I stood there for a second, watching, not moving. I had spent years running on broken glass, and here was a room where the only thing required of me was to sit still and press keys. I was hooked. From that day on, I only played football in PE class.

We called it the Canter shop, because “canter” is how we pronounced the word counter, and Counter-Strike was the reason the shop was so popular. It became a space where my friends and I could experience something close to a normal childhood. We went there before school during evening shifts and after school during morning ones. It became part of our routine, like school itself, only louder and more alive.

Playing Counter-Strike was also part of a tradition my friends and I followed during Ramadan. Right after the Iftar, we would play half an hour before Al-Tarawih prayers, never skipping a day. Each one with a can of Coca-Cola put next to the keyboard, we played.

The game played a part in our first day of Eid outings. After getting dressed in new clothes, greeting my relatives, and collecting Eidya from them, I would go out with my friends to play Counter-Strike for hours.

In 2014, during a 51-day war that overlapped with Eid, there was a temporary humanitarian ceasefire on the first day that lasted only a few hours. My friends and I did not waste the chance: We went to a Canter shop, filled with joy after being trapped at home for days without seeing our friends, which felt like the only thing that mattered. We played like it was any other Eid, and maybe that was the strangest thing — how easy it was for us kids to let go of the world outside.

I was aware of the fact that we were playing at war in our video game while the city was under siege outside. But for me, Counter-Strike was never a mirror of our reality. It was just a way to escape from the streets and play with my friends safely inside a room. 

Back in 2022 when I was in college, my friends and I went back to the Canter shops, with the same crowded rooms, same glowing screens, same voices. We tried to feel like kids again. My hands remembered the keyboard, and for a few minutes, that was almost enough. The room was the same. But we were not. We had seen too much to laugh the way we used to, not because we forgot how, but the war made sure we never forgot the world outside again, even in the rooms where we tried.

When we left, the feeling didn’t follow us the way it used to. It stayed behind, with the screens and the noise, like something that belonged to who we once were and couldn’t be sustained by who we had become.