DEIR AL BALAH, Gaza Strip — 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, 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.
But in the center of town, people relax under shady trees, chatting with friends over coffee, freshly squeezed mango juice, or avocado smoothies. Families crowd around Zain’s dessert stand or wait for juices from Karameesh, where fresh fruit dangles from the ceiling. Others head to the beach, a chance to watch the waves and get their children out of cramped shelters.
An olive press has been turning this season’s harvest — far smaller than usual and picked as drones buzzed overhead — into golden-green oil. On Deir al Balah’s outskirts, a farmer has been planting his field with cabbage and winter greens. The grumbling of his tractor is a strange echo of what life was like before the war; strange, but welcome.
Every conflict has its pockets of ordinariness, places where life ticks on away from the bombs and the headlines. Israeli officials have been quick to highlight such scenes, posting photographs of well-stocked markets to suggest reports of shortages were overblown.
But not many wars are squeezed into a Las Vegas-size strip of land that has been bombed almost everywhere yet is almost impossible to flee. In Gaza starving under a near-total Israeli siege, which has blocked all but a dribble of aid and commercial supplies, residents and aid workers say the little food for sale is hopelessly expensive.
Everyone seems to know someone who has been killed. Most of the survivors are living in miserable squalor. It is hard to imagine any escape.
And there isn’t, not in any sure sense. An airstrike could rip things apart at any time, or Israel’s military could order families to evacuate yet again before it starts another operation against Hamas, as it did in Deir al Balah in August.
But compared with the rest of Gaza, Deir al Balah has gone relatively unscathed, allowing the United Nations and aid groups to set up central offices there. A cautious rhythm has returned to the streets. Lunch, coffee, a stop for dessert: the more mundane, Palestinians say, the more precious it seems.
Martyrs’ Street, the city’s longest thoroughfare, is lined with cafes, ice cream shops and eateries. Many are familiar to residents displaced from Gaza City, where the same business names once meant pleasure, a weekend treat, or just a stop after work.
Their reappearance has been bittersweet. The more Gaza City stores open in Deir al Balah, the more permanent the displacement seems.
One of them is Shawarma Moaz, a Gaza City spot that reopened on Martyrs’ Street in March. Its manager, Aaed Abu Karsh, 35, said that customers have been joking to him, “Since you’re here, seems like all of us will be away from home even longer.”
Few can afford to go out. Most Palestinians have no savings and little if any, income. On Martyrs’ Street, a smoothie can cost $4 (twice the prewar price), a shawarma sandwich about $11 (nearly three times what it used to). A customer protest over the high price of meat shut down some restaurants for two days this month.
But some without the means to buy come by just to say hello, happy to see the street abuzz, business owners say.
At one cafe, Ayah Jweifel, 19, a second-year multimedia major at Al Aqsa University, was laughing and gossiping one recent afternoon with her sister, Shahd, 17. They were talking about plans, talking about anything but the fighting.
“I just have one goal, to forget that there are things like war, bombing, and killing,” Ayah Jweifel said. “Seeing people around me who are laughing, smiling and having fun — it gives me hope that we can get our lives before Oct. 7 back.”
That day last year, Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, led raids on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. Israel counterattacked, killing more than 40,000 people, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The war seemed distant at the cafe. The inside was spick-and-span, with a counter and floor of faux marble and a glass display case for pastries; outside, waiters served cappuccinos, dessert, and water pipes to customers sitting around wooden tables. Lights were twirled around the trunks of olive and palm trees.
The contrast with the rest of Gaza, even with other parts of the city, could be called surreal. But what people really found surreal was the war itself. Meeting friends, drinking coffee — that was real life, they said, or what real life was supposed to be.
“We have to adapt to the situation,” Shahd Jweifel said. It had been her idea to get her sister and friends to meet up there once a week. “Here we feel like we’re just like everyone else in the rest of the world.”
Except they weren’t. In one corner of the cafe’s garden hung a whiteboard that aid workers had been using to train people to avoid the unexploded ordnance littering Gaza.
The Jweifel sisters had promised their family that they would leave for home before sunset, they said, since public order broke down months ago and it was safer not to move in the dark.
Carving out minutes of normalcy also means willfully forgetting what is happening elsewhere in Gaza.
“It’s like we’re lying to ourselves,” said al-Danaf, the clinic secretary from Gaza City. “We’re in a good place, but our hearts and minds are following the bad news from the north.”
Whenever she called Dareen, her daughter in northern Gaza, al-Danaf said, Dareen would ask, “What are you having for lunch today?” It was a lacerating if unintended, reminder: While al-Danaf could get shawarma, she said, Dareen had almost nothing. Amid a new attack on northern Gaza beginning last month, Israel had restricted supplies there even further.
Feeling guilty, al-Danaf said that she sometimes lied, telling her daughter she was having potatoes or lentils.
After Shawarma Moaz’s team fled Gaza City, it took months to accept that they would not be returning anytime soon, and months more to scrape together enough to start over, Abu Karsh said.
Nothing was easy. Equipment and a storefront took some creativity to find; they bought some items from people they thought had probably stolen things from destroyed restaurants, he said. A nearby airstrike damaged the solar panels they used for power.
For every business on Martyrs’ Street, covering costs is a struggle.
Chef Warif recently announced it was closing temporarily because frozen meat prices were so exorbitant.
But at least, Abu Karsh said, they had gotten part of their lives back.
“We’re not sitting in our tents,” he said, “mourning everything we lost.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
