“Will the borders be opened next week?”
So I was asked by my friend Rozan, who yearns to travel and see her brother who has been outside Gaza for two years, as soon as I got to our workspace. Her eyes glittered as she showed me a Facebook post on her phone repeating an often-heard rumor about the reopening of Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt.
She urged me to answer as I stood silently reading the post and tried to avert my eyes from her beaming smile.
Rozan describes my fact-checking job as “catching the liar.”
Rozan, a UX UI designer whose job is to make websites and apps enjoyable and easy to use, and I, a fact-checker, are freelancers who used to work from home. The war came and turned our comfortable jobs into one of the toughest. Israel imposed a complete siege on the Gaza Strip two days after the outbreak of the war. With sparse electricity and internet, Gaza sank into darkness and we freelancers struggled to continue our work.
After around a year, workspaces catering to freelancers and students started to appear in Gaza, providing the badly needed power and internet that remain unavailable nearly everywhere else……more
