Then came October 7th, and everything changed.

His home was reduced to rubble. His profession, his passion for justice, suddenly had no place in a city consumed by war. Like hundreds of thousands of others, Fadi became a displaced man, forced with his family into a shelter in Al-Nuseirat. There, survival not justice became the question of the day.

In the makeshift tents of displacement, people clung to worn-out banknotes. After two years of blockade, the same bills had passed through countless hands until they were torn, faded, and frayed. Replacing them was nearly impossible; commissions had soared to over 50%, beyond what most families could ever afford.

Fadi, drawing on his past experience in currency exchange, found an unexpected way to help. With simple tools and steady hands, he began repairing these fragile banknotes mending their edges, piecing them back together, giving them a second life. Word spread quickly, and soon people came to him in search not only of restored money, but of relief from the crushing weight of scarcity.

This was not merely a trade. It was an act of quiet resistance.

The man who once wrote his dissertation on international justice was now serving justice in another form: by easing the burden of a father who could not afford milk, or a mother desperate for her baby’s medicine.

For Fadi, every banknote he restored carried the face of Gaza itself: torn, scarred, yet refusing to be discarded. A city, like its people, that insists on survival patching itself together, again and again, with whatever hope remains.

Fadi Al-Za’im is more than a lawyer or a mender of paper. He is a reflection of Gaza’s story: where dreams collapse under rubble, yet rise again through the smallest acts, the simplest tools, and the unyielding strength of those who refuse to stop trying

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Abu Mahmoud, a 45-year-old former prisoner from Beit Hanoun, Gaza, once worked as a barber and a father of five. After years of imprisonment by Israeli forces, he thought he had already faced the worst life could offer until the war took everything else. His eldest son, 16, was killed while fetching clean water during their ninth displacement. The family spent days searching through improvised morgues filled with ice cream and cheese freezers to find his body.

But Abu Mahmoud’s story did not end with grief. During his attempt to flee south on December 28, 2024, he was detained at an Israeli checkpoint under extreme conditions. He describes random arrests, public humiliation, and torture that included electric shocks, forced nakedness, and being held in freezing weather. Later, he was transferred to a detention site known as Cidyteman, where detainees endured “disco torture” seven days in isolation, tied and blindfolded, with deafening music blasting nonstop.

Abu Mahmoud survived, but his story captures the unrelenting human cost of displacement, detention, and psychological warfare in Gaza, a narrative that reveals not only loss, but endurance in the face of systematic dehumanization.

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These pieces were written by Rama Hussain in Gaza. She does not have substack, but you can find and follow her on instagram @ rama_hussain95 ! I hope everyone takes a moment to appreciate Rama’s words, her advocacy, and her strength to keep documenting the Gaza Genocide as she lives through it.