Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – Every morning, Abdel Karim Salman begins his routine by heading out carrying his own phone and his wife’s phone, both completely drained of charge. He walks to a nearby charging point to plug them in and recharge them again.
Throughout the night, Abdel Karim relies entirely on the torches from the phones to light the inside of the tent he lives in with his family in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah.
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Abdel Karim, 28, a former civil engineer at the Beit Lahiya municipality in northern Gaza, was displaced to Deir el-Balah a year and a half ago with his wife and two children, along with about 30 members of his extended family.
His family home was completely destroyed on October 9, 2023, in the first few days of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Abdel Karim and his family have been on a difficult journey of displacement since then, with little in the way of normality, and in particular, a regular source of electricity for a bulb in his tent.
So he looks for alternatives to light up the structure, namely the phones, despite the rapid battery drain caused by keeping the torch function on.
“I charge my phone and my wife’s phone, and we use them for lighting at night, especially since my children are under five years old and they get scared if they wake up in the dark,” he says.
Abdel Karim says that the suffering caused by electricity shortages in Gaza is one of the largest “silent” forms of suffering that receives little attention.
For Abdel Karim, the charging process itself has turned into a daily, exhausting burden.
He walks between 150 and 200 metres every day to reach a charging point, paying between two and four shekels ($0.65 to $1.30) per charging session, twice a day.
“That means about eight to 10 shekels ($2.55 to $3.20) per day just for charging phones,” Abdel Karim explains, equivalent to approximately 270 to 300 shekels ($86 to $95) per month, a large amount given the lack of income among displaced families in Gaza amid the territory’s war-driven economic crisis.
“Many days and nights we sleep in darkness inside our tent. When we can’t charge the phones, they turn off, and we are unable to recharge them.”
Few options
With municipality-supplied electricity absent for two years in Gaza, several temporary alternatives have emerged, such as solar-powered lamps, but they remain unaffordable for most residents, having increased tenfold to about 300 shekels ($95) during the war.
As for solar energy systems, they are even more expensive, reaching $420 per panel, and with the additional cost of a battery – about $1,200 – and an inverter. All these items are also scarce due to severe Israeli restrictions on their entry into the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war.
For Abdel Karim, who lost his job soon after the war began, those sums are out of his reach.
Among the alternative solutions introduced during the war are private generator-based electricity systems operating on diesel fuel.
However, those are also unaffordable for many, and their services have fluctuated due to irregular fuel supplies through the crossings.
And so, with most options simply too expensive, that leaves many in Gaza in the same boat as Abdel Karim.
The impact of the power cuts is not limited to lighting or charging, but extends to every detail of daily life, especially for families with children.
“There is no refrigerator, no washing machine … even baby milk cannot be stored for more than two or three hours,” Abdel Karim explains, as he remembers his previous life, when his home was filled with electrical appliances and reliable power.
“The phone charging socket used to be right beside my bed. I could plug it in whenever I wanted. Today, that has become a dream inside this tent,” Abdel Karim adds.
He also says his children have been psychologically affected, especially his eldest son, due to the lack of any means of electronic entertainment or distraction from his grim surroundings.
“There is no TV or screen. He keeps asking for the phone all the time just to calm down, but that also needs charging. Everything is dependent on electricity.”
According to Abdel Karim, his suffering is not an exception. He believes almost all of the people in Gaza are living the same reality, noting that even families in nearby camps who tried to pool resources to buy energy systems have been unable to afford them.
“We hope God brings relief … because we are truly left without any solutions, as if we were abandoned in the desert.”
Longstanding problem
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, and Israel then began its war on Gaza.
More than two years on, Gaza has been decimated by Israeli attacks – on top of the more than 75,000 Palestinians killed.
But even before the war, Gaza faced daily rolling blackouts due to limited power imports from Israel and fuel shortages.
Israel, despite withdrawing its illegal settlements from Gaza in 2005, continued to control access into and out of the Palestinian enclave, and repeatedly attacked it.
And so, even in normal conditions, most households only received a few hours of electricity per day, relying on a fragile mix of imported supply and Gaza’s one power plant.
The situation escalated sharply after October 7, when Israel declared a “complete siege” on Gaza, cutting electricity supply and blocking fuel imports.
Within days, Gaza’s power plant shut down due to fuel depletion, and by October 11, 2023, the territory entered a full electricity blackout, according to United Nations agencies.
With no fuel entering and transmission lines cut, homes, hospitals, water systems and communication networks lost reliable access to power, shifting to limited and increasingly unsustainable generator use.
Since then, Gaza’s electricity infrastructure has continued to deteriorate due to both fuel shortages and widespread physical destruction of the grid. Generators remain the primary alternative but are severely constrained by fuel scarcity, affecting essential services such as healthcare, water production and telecommunications.
During the time between 2025 and 2026, Gaza’s power system is widely described as effectively non-functional, with electricity access fragmented, inconsistent and largely dependent on emergency solutions rather than a stable grid.
An opportunity
The severe electricity crisis has created an indirect source of income for Jamal Musbah, 50, who runs a mobile phone charging station powered by solar energy and a generator line.
Before the war, Jamal worked as a farmer and owned two agricultural plots on the eastern borders of Deir el-Balah. Today, they have been bulldozed and fall under Israeli control.
His charging station has instead become his main source of income, supporting his eight children.
“I had an energy system consisting of six panels, batteries, and a device, which I used for pumping water and irrigating the remaining land around my house before the war,” Jamal says to Al Jazeera.
As an alternative income source after the war and the electricity blackout in Gaza, Jamal repurposed his solar system to provide basic phone charging services to residents, though this came with major challenges.
“The demand for charging was extremely high, and my batteries were exhausted within the first months, as electricity became very scarce at home,” he adds.
However, things worsened when a neighbouring house was targeted, destroying four of his six solar panels, significantly reducing his capacity and income.
At the beginning of the service, Jamal also offered food refrigeration services alongside phone and battery charging, but after the damage and battery depletion, he had to stop those services.
“We used to charge about 100 to 200 phones daily. Now we only manage 50 to 60 at most due to reduced efficiency of the solar panels,” Jamal says, attributing this also to weather conditions, clouds and the winter season, when solar efficiency drops significantly.
“In winter, you look for alternatives to solar panels and turn to generators that barely work … the electricity crisis makes you feel like you are running in a never-ending cycle of suffering.”
His charging station now operates with a small system of two panels and one battery.
People from nearby areas, including university students and displaced families, rely on it due to a lack of alternatives and the inability to afford generator-based electricity subscriptions.
“My sons are university graduates and earn their living from this station. We charge 1 to 2 shekels per phone.”
Even though Jamal is able to make some money out of the crisis, he ultimately faces the same hardships as others in Gaza do.
“Economic hardship has affected all of us … even basic services like phone charging have become a heavy burden. There are no local solutions to this crisis.”
“The only real and lasting solution is the official restoration of electricity to the Gaza Strip.”