We’re stitching our future back together in Gaza, one English word at a time
Members of Gaza English Corner meet in a park in Gaza City, August 2026
Said Alsaloul reports in +972 on 20 August 2026:
On Salah Al-Din Street, the main north-south highway through Gaza, silence carries a different weight when a tank is watching you. Nearly 20 of us were crammed into a tarp-covered cart hitched to an old, barely moving car, which had broken down in the middle of the road — surrounded by a rubble-strewn wasteland.
A few dozen meters away, an Israeli tank idled on a sandbank, its turret slowly turning in our direction. Above us came the consistent hum of military aircraft. The relentless buzz of drones filled the air, punctuated by distant gunfire.
Along the road, brightly-painted concrete blocks marked the edge of the “Yellow Line” — or “the death line” as it has become commonly known among locals. Reaching our weekly meeting in Gaza City means traveling along this corridor, where approaching the wrong area can be lethal and where Palestinians fear being detained or shot. The blocks had been moved farther onto the road since we had last passed, leaving us unexpectedly close to the area under Israeli military control.
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What began as an informal English-speaking group has grown into a community of more than 200 Palestinians from northern, central, and southern Gaza. Each week, several of us traverse damaged roads and passes close to Israeli-controlled zones to reach Gaza City, paying around $15 each for transportation and the rented room.
In Gaza, where families are rationing food and calculating the cost of every basic necessity, spending that much money to practice English is an extraordinary sacrifice. Yet people continue to come because English has become more than a language skill. It can mean access to scholarships and education abroad, while the meetings themselves offer something increasingly rare here — a place to speak, grieve, connect, and imagine a less bleak future.