A year and a half into the relentless war on Gaza, one of my relatives tried to rebuild the fragments of his life by himself, defying the weight of destruction and loss.
In March 2025, he decided to marry and prepare a small room on the ruins of his destroyed home in Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighborhood. With nothing left but rubble, he gathered broken stones from his demolished house, cleaned and reshaped what could be salvaged, and built a small space where he and his bride could begin again.
Just a month later, Israeli forces invaded the neighborhood, forcing residents to flee once more and obliterating what remained.
His attempt, one among many similar efforts across Gaza, embodied the quiet determination of people struggling to stitch life back together amid a landscape of ruins. Each such act of rebuilding stands as resistance to the ever-growing mountains of debris produced by the ongoing campaign of annihilation that has engulfed Gaza since October 2023.
According to an October 2025 United Nations report, the volume of rubble generated by the war in Gaza has reached up to 60 million tonnes, an amount roughly equal by volume to 15 Great Pyramids of Giza or 25 Eiffel Towers. This unprecedented scale of destruction marks one of the most extreme environmental catastrophes on record. …..more
