"What we know is that, because Israel controls about seventy per cent of the territory of the Gaza Strip, some two million people are squeezed into thirty per cent of the territory. We know that eighty-one per cent of the Gaza Strip is damaged or destroyed, and more than three hundred thousand housing units were completely destroyed during the war, in addition to schools and other infrastructure, like clinics, hospitals, and mosques."

Photograph by Mohammad Abu Elseba / ZUMA / Reuters

The New Yorker

September 21, 2026 

Q. & A.

What Life Is Actually Like in Gaza Today

Nearly a year after the ceasefire, the analyst Jaser AbuMousa explains the impediments to rebuilding, and the devastation of his own family.

At least twenty-one people, many of them children, were killed earlier this week after a building collapsed in Gaza City, highlighting the dangerous conditions that still exist in the Gaza Strip. The building, like much of the remaining infrastructure in Gaza, had been damaged by Israeli strikes in the war that began after the massacre of October 7, 2023, and which has now killed seventy-four thousand Palestinians. More than thirteen hundred of those deaths have occurred since last October, when a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas went into effect, and Israel was left in control of just over half of Gaza. (Since the ceasefire, Israel has expanded its territory and now controls around seventy per cent of the strip.) The Trump Administration, which broadly supports Israeli policy, has given authority to the so-called Board of Peace to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction. But last month the board’s high representative for Gaza took the surprising step of criticizing Israel for its continued military strikes in Gaza, and argued that such attacks threaten both the ceasefire and the chances of Hamas ever disarming.

I recently spoke by phone with Jaser AbuMousa, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, and a non-resident policy adviser at the International Peace Institute, who was born and raised in Gaza. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what daily life in Gaza is like for Palestinians, what has and has not changed since the ceasefire, and his own family’s horrific experience throughout the past three years.

To what degree... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/what-life-is-actually-like-in-gaza-today 

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