It’s Eid al-Fitr in Gaza, a holiday period when – in happier years – Palestinians gather to celebrate the end of Ramadan in cheerfully patterned ‘Eid outfits’. The freshly bought clothes signify hope and renewal.
This, however, is a very different Eid. In a shelter in a school in Deir Al-Balah, a city in the centre of the Gaza Strip, the animated film SpongeBob SquarePants plays on the wall. The watching children nod and smile along to the antics of a sea sponge projected from a laptop onto a makeshift sheet drawn across the wall. This is a school where lessons have been paused for the past five months.
Israel’s war on Gaza began on 22 October, 2023, in retaliation for the 7 October attacks on Israel conducted by Hamas, a Sunni Muslim political and military movement that governs part of the Gaza Strip. Several of the children at the shelter in Deir Al-Balah today have been orphaned by the conflict. All have been displaced multiple times by aerial bombings and land assaults. Some have seen their parents taken away in front of their eyes by Israeli forces.
