Coffee, Juice, Shawarma: Tiny Traces of Normal Life in a Ruined Gaza

Most people in the enclave are struggling just to survive Israel’s assault on Hamas, and experts say famine is imminent. Yet a few pockets of ordinary life have bloomed in defiance of the war.

At long last, something to celebrate: People were saying that the Chef Warif restaurant, whose Syrian-style shawarma sandwiches were famous in Gaza City before the war, had reopened. Not in the city itself, which the war had reduced largely to rubble. And not the same quality of meat, which the restaurant’s owner now had to buy frozen and at steep prices from traders importing it to the Gaza Strip.

But it was shawarma, shawarma from home. Long lines formed this July as workers sawed the first slices of roasting beef or chicken off the spit and bundled it in flatbread with the restaurant’s signature garlic sauce.

Many of those in line were longtime customers who had fled Gaza City, in the north, for Deir al Balah, the city in central Gaza where Chef Warif had reopened. Living in tents or crammed shelters under smoky skies, their ears painfully accustomed to the thunder of Israeli airstrikes, they had been desperate for this — a normal moment.

“When I heard about Chef Warif, I jumped for joy,” said Naela al-Danaf, 40, a secretary at a local clinic who escaped Gaza City early in the war. It was a relief to see the owner standing there, she said, dishing out lunch like everything was fine.

In parts of Deir al Balah, once known for its restful olive and date palm groves, the trees are gone or have turned gray with ash and dirt, and the ground is slick with sewage. People look away from the rotting carcasses of horses and dogs. Once familiar buildings are piles of debris. Bombing can shatter the calm in a second. Though municipal trash pickup has started again in places, it often smells like a dumpster.