It took more than 20 minutes and eight dropped WhatsApp calls to finally connect with Farida Algoul in Gaza. Internet service is not reliable anywhere in the territory, including in the provisional co-working space in the city of Deir al-Balah, where she and 50 or so others work remotely.
An English teacher by training, Algoul splits her time between a makeshift classroom in a tent, where she teaches for free, and a table in this cafe turned workspace where she translates documents from Arabic to English. Over the grainy video call, other freelancers who had been forcibly displaced to the central Gazan city could be seen working alongside her, all of them vying for the coveted internet connection.
Algoul spends six hours a day in that co-working space completing assignments received via Upwork, a freelance work marketplace. It is one of three free-to-use workspaces set up by Hope Hub, an initiative started in a tent in Rafah a few months into Israel’s assault on Gaza. She earns $200 a month, with Upwork taking 10% and currency exchange companies another 20 to 30%.
“Everything is devastation around us,” Algoul said. “This has diminished the economic opportunities for people in Gaza. I’m looking for a job for eight months. I evacuated alone without my parents. I did not have any income to support me. I just open my laptop and go to work as a freelancer.”
Algoul, like so many others, has been left with few other options to work. Israel’s 17-year land and sea blockade of Gaza has long limited economic opportunities within the strip, among the reasons why at least 12,000 workers in the territory have turned to online freelance work for income, according to the UN. In the aftermath of 7 October 2023, Israel’s bombardment of the already besieged strip has rendered jobs nearly nonexistent, according to an assessment by the International Labor Organization.
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Meanwhile, a year of airstrikes has decimated Gaza’s infrastructure, making the two resources freelancers depend on – a strong internet connection and reliable electricity – hard to come by. When internet service is available, it’s slow or unstable. Electricity comes and goes.
Then there’s the matter of their safety. Algoul and other workers who spoke to the Guardian said they take on considerable risk when they make their way to co-working spaces or ad-hoc internet hotspots on the street.
“Workers in Gaza live under the constant fear of airstrikes,” said Algoul, who has lost 300 members of her family over the last year. “This kind of problem, no one around the world experiences. This situation is just in Gaza.”
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Before Algoul could say more, she was interrupted by a flurry of movement. She said she had to cut the call short. Parts of the city were being bombed and everyone in the co-working space was being told to leave. Algoul, who had evacuated from the north of Gaza and left her parents behind, didn’t know where she’d go. But she’d be fine, she said assuredly. She was just afraid for the safety of the children she taught.
“It’s not easy to work in this environment,” Algoul said. “After one minute, I don’t know if I will not exist, [if] I will be a martyr.”
‘I’d rather risk my life to work’
When Waleed Iky talks to potential clients on Upwork or Mostaql – a popular freelancing platform in the Middle East and north Africa – he doesn’t always tell them that he lives in Gaza. Iky, an entrepreneur who started a one-man marketing operation, said he worries clients might see his situation or even his background as a liability.
“It’s risky for business to work with us sometimes,” Iky said. “[Sometimes] the clients know and support. If they don’t, we don’t mention it. We do our best for it to not affect our work.”
Disruptions to work are unavoidable, Iky said. He graduated from the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) just two months before the war began and spent the first five months of Israel’s assault evacuating to cities he and his family were told would be safe from airstrikes. One of those towns, Al-Zahra, crumbled around him.
“They destroyed the whole city,” he said. “Twenty-four buildings collapsed in front of our eyes. For my family it was a hard night.”
During those few months, Iky and his family focused on simply staying alive. Starting his business again was the furthest thing from his mind. But now, like Algoul, he works out of Hope Hub. He currently has two clients through Upwork for whom he does marketing.
Leaving the tents where many of the freelancers have sheltered is dangerous. There’s often no telling when or where bombs will be dropped, whether they’ll be shot at or otherwise attacked. But for Iky, it’s better than sitting around waiting for the next bomb to go off.
“I decided to get back online,” Iky said. “When I got back to work, my psychological health got better. Staying home and not doing anything, not doing what you love, it’s killing more than my muscles. I’d rather work and risk my life to work than stay at home.”
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For many clients, it’s been business as usual, regardless of the difficulties of workers living in Gaza under bombardment. One potential client asked Iky if he’d be comfortable working with an Israeli organization. He told them he would not. They decided not to hire him. Others offer little flexibility around the deadlines they set for Iky’s projects.
“Some of them are abroad who don’t understand the struggle we have,” Iky said.
The freelancers have to take turns charging their laptops, in an effort to not use too much electricity. An hour of charging his laptop buys Iky four to five hours of work. When the electricity is out, he’ll try to send his clients updates over WhatsApp or go to a nearby cafe and pay for internet.
Even when they do manage to work, many freelancers have difficulty accessing their earnings. Bank branches and ATMs have been destroyed, PayPal has stopped providing its services to all Palestinians in the occupied territories and currency exchange shops charge a fee of anywhere from 15 to 30% depending on the demand. Iky, one of the fortunate few with a bank account, often opts to wait to withdraw any money to avoid paying exorbitant fees.
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Unstable internet and airstrikes
Iky is one of more than 1,300 freelancers and students who have used Hope Hub’s flexible workspaces across Gaza, Egypt and now Lebanon since Salah Ahmad, who is from Gaza, and his co-founder Fady Issawi launched the initiative in January 2024. While other co-working spaces have since opened up, Hope Hub was the first to begin operating during the war and remains one of the few that is free to use. Because of the limited resources, Hope Hub divides the day into four timed shifts – the first one for remote workers, the second two for freelancers and the last for students.
Ahmad had been working with freelancers since at least 2020 when he opened his first co-working space, which offered mentorship and training for remote workers in partnership with international universities and organizations. But he, like hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, was forced to leave his life and his dreams behind after 7 October. The building that once housed his nearly 11,000 sq ft (1,022 sq metre) workspace was hit by airstrikes twice, he said, completely destroying the company he and his team had built. Videos of the office before and after the strikes show debris and shattered glass where sleek and contemporary conference rooms and cafes once stood. Ahmad was displaced four times before he finally reached Rafah, which he and others were told would be a safe area.
It was there, in the Tal al-Sultan refugee camp, that he started Hope Hub with five people working out of a tent. He wanted to help people restart their companies or, at the very least, find something to fill their time and drown out the noise of drones buzzing around them.
“A lot of people feel that it is very difficult to do nothing and just wait in an area that is being bombed every minute. You just wait to die in the next bomb,” he said. “But we are trying to survive.”
He and Issawi began raising funds to expand Hope Hub. They searched for the most cost-effective ways to provide electricity in such a tenuous situation. They rented a former cafe and bought solar panels, tables and chairs. Access to the internet was harder to manage. Palestine’s major telecom provider, Paltel, was not operational at the time. Its offices and 80% of its 500 cell towers had been destroyed. Ahmad initially relied on a wireless connection from a local provider focused on international aid organizations based in Gaza. It was expensive and complicated, he said.
“It wasn’t encouraged to provide internet to initiatives or individuals at the time, as internet networks were being targeted [by Israel],” he said.
After three months of relying on unstable wireless internet and several conversations with Palestine’s ministry of communications and digital economy, Ahmad was able to secure high-speed internet lines from Paltel. Hope Hub opened up a second location in Deir al-Balah in April and a third in Khan Younis in May. By the end of May, however, Israel began its invasion into the designated safe area of Rafah. The cafe that housed the original Hope Hub location was destroyed, and Ahmad once again evacuated.
“We were able to move our equipment with minimal losses, but the [cafe] owner lost everything,” he said.
In the Hope Hub locations still standing, electricity remains limited, and the internet connection, while faster than most everything else available in Gaza, can still be unstable. With the winter coming, the solar panels that power Hope Hub will be less reliable.
‘My right as a student is to complete my studies’
Othman Shbeir was supposed to graduate with a computer science degree from IUG last year. But classes were put on hold for months. Now, he walks two hours every day to get to Hope Hub, where he takes classes online. There isn’t a place for him to finish his studies any closer to where he lives.
“It’s the only choice I have,” Shbeir said. “I have to do this because we need to get money. We live in a disaster with high prices. We need to make a living for us. We have to continue achieving our life goals. Life doesn’t stop for us. Life didn’t stop at war. Life has to continue.”
There are many areas without co-working spaces at all. There, students turn to internet cafes or huddle around what they call “street internet” – a makeshift hotspot they pay for per hour in the middle of the street. They sit out in the open, risking being targeted, while they finish their assignments or watch online lectures.
Shbeir has more questions than answers. He doesn’t know when he’ll be able to graduate. He doesn’t know if he’ll be attacked while walking to Hope Hub. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to get a job once he does graduate. But he knows he needs to graduate in order to get a job. Though he’s held several internships, local organizations that need data scientists like him aren’t willing to hire someone without a degree.
Other students in Gaza face the same obstacles. Aya Esam is in her final year of dental school. But as a student, she and her classmates have to finish clinics before they can graduate. They don’t know when it will be safe enough for the university to conduct in-person trainings or when they would be able to leave Gaza to finish trainings elsewhere.
“It’s hard to be a big dreamer in Gaza,” Esam said. “This is my right as a human in this life to complete my studies. I used to have a dream about my future.”
For the future generation of would-be computer scientists, doctors and freelancers, aspirations have been replaced by worries about where they will get their next meal, Algoul said. For many of the 50 students who pile into the education tent she has set up, learning English is a matter of survival. They want to be able to appeal to people abroad to send food or donate money, she said. Still, she isn’t giving up.
“Despite everything, wallah, I continue to find ways to inspire hope and resilience not just for myself but for the community around me,” Algoul said. “We will teach the world what resilience means.”
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