While Gaza’s housing crisis remains catastrophic with cement and steel blocked by Israel from entering the Strip, some Palestinians are turning to improvised methods and other workarounds in a bid to make their shelters safer or more habitable.
Among those Palestinians is Jaafar Atallah, a potter in Gaza, who decided to build a home from the earth. It was to be like the bread ovens his family had been making for generations, but big enough for his parents to live in, according to the Financial Times.
Atallah gathered clay from an area of Gaza a few kilometers from his tent and — with the help of about 15 people, including his father, also a potter — he set about making mud bricks.
For months, they learned as they built. Finally, they completed a domed hut, “so solid you could stand on top of it”, said Atallah, whose project was backed by pottery groups around the world after he shared videos online.
The clay structure was a relief after the flimsy protection of the tent: “You can keep your food in this room. In a tent, tomatoes and cucumbers won’t last a day and will rot. Life in the tents is so hard. There is such heat in the summer, it is torture,” Atallah said.
Atallah’s experience reflects the reality of thousands of families looking for alternatives after almost all buildings in Gaza have been destroyed by two years of bombardment amid Israel’s ban on concrete and steel imports.
Several Gazans are reusing steel reinforcing bars and concrete from the debris of buildings, scavenging for cement lying underwater in the port and resorting to mud to make bricks and mortar.
“We already have clay in our land, we don’t have to manufacture it, we don’t need things that we have to get from the crossing [with Israel], which is at the whim of the occupation,” said Atallah, who even designed a waterproof glaze for the bricks. “The occupation does not control this. It’s from our land, our soil.”
According to the UN, 1.9 million Gazans are displaced or live in tents, which lack sanitation or other utilities.
Reconstruction of Gaza remains a distant dream for its people. Israel bans building materials from entering Gaza on the grounds that the materials may be used for military purposes such as tunnel construction.
In May, teenage sisters Tala, 17, and Farah Moussa, 15, won a youth-focused award from the Swiss-based Earth Foundation for recycling cement debris into bricks.
Displaced with their family five times since the start of the war, they now live in a tent in Nuseirat in the center of the Gaza Strip. “We got the idea when our house was bombed,” said Tala. “We thought we had to do something and find a solution that comes from the problem itself, so we are using the rubble.”
Tala said, “We made five or six prototypes before we got it right. We researched on the internet and in books. Now we want to use the [$12,500] prize money to set up workshops to teach others how to make bricks.”
Using mud and stones, Gaza residents rebuild homes destroyed in months of conflict, as lack of access to construction material leaves families with few options.
Their efforts reflect the ability to adapt to the most extreme conditions to restore a normal life, even within walls built from the earth and the debris of buildings.
