Learning To Drive in Gaza City

Jehad Alshrafi / AP This is your first of three free stories this month. Become a free or sustaining member to read unlimited articles, webinars and ebooks. Become A MemberI never imagined, back when I started taking driving lessons in the fall of 2023, that I would one day feel grateful for every practice session I had in Gaza City. During every lesson, we wound through many streets, sometimes sharing the car with more than one trainee, spending over an hour moving between roads and neighborhoods. I looked out the windshield then without thinking much of it — the buildings, the sidewalks, the shops, the trees, the traffic. The details felt so ordinary. Weeks later, after Israel’s bombing campaign had begun and my lessons at Al Shati Driving School had come to an abrupt halt, I would cling to those memories. When I passed through those same neighborhoods again, I would close my eyes, unwilling to overwrite my recollections. Sometimes, I forced myself to keep them open so I could document the destruction with my camera, so I could bear witness to these scenes of ruin. During the first week of the war, the Palestine Tower was bombed. The tower housed the radio station where I had worked for eight years, alongside other media institutions. I lost my job due to the war, but it felt even worse that I would never see the tower again. I couldn’t walk down Al-Shuhada Street, west of Gaza City, and see the rubble left where the tower had stood so tall and strong every morning. I was afraid to face its new image, broken and demolished. Every time I compare old photos of Gaza to what my city looks like today, I’m overcome by tears. The photos no longer bring feelings of nostalgia. They bring fresh pain, reminding us of the scale of what we’ve lost. A Palestinian vendor offers bottles of diesel for sale in al-Maghazi refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, Saturday, Aug. 15, 2026. (Photo by Abdel Kareem Hana / AP) A few months ago, I learned that driving schools had resumed operating after more than two years of forced closure. I know I won’t be able to buy a car anytime soon; cars that used to cost around $10,000 now sell for more than $40,000, on top of soaring prices for the limited supply of fuel. Still, I decide to go back and finish my lessons at Al Shati. When I sit behind the wheel again, the neighborhoods I navigate are unrecognizable from what I’d driven through two years prior. The streets I memorized are gone. The landmarks are rubble. The roads are littered with rubble and abandoned vehicles. Buildings that once buzzed with life have turned into tents sheltering the displaced. The UN’s satellite centre estimated back in 2024 that 65% of Gaza’s roads had been damaged. A more recent assessment by the World Bank, the European Union, and the United Nations puts the number even higher, closer to 87%, and found that in North Gaza and Rafah, nearly nine out of ten roads are now impassable. Salah al-Din Road, the highway that once ran the length of the strip, is gone in all but a few stretches. Gaza City Municipality says more than 500 miles of paved streets have been ground down to dirt. Along the roads now, it isn’t normal traffic that catches drivers’ eyes, but lines of people waiting — to fill water containers, for a food parcel, in front of a soup kitchen. The city no longer moves to the rhythm of work or school, but in search of the most basic means of survival. I’m no longer stopping for children in school uniforms, crossing the streets on their way to class. Now, they carry burdens bigger than their own bodies. Water containers, places in aid lines, lives inside tents that resemble nothing of what childhood should look like. Meanwhile, the driving school manual shows tree-lined roads and people dressed neatly for work early in the morning. Even the driving lesson itself feels different. My instructor, Karam, is constantly anxious that the car’s tires will be damaged. It’s not paranoia. A single tire now costs around $1,500, given how hard it is to bring spare parts into Gaza, so any damage could mean the car stops running entirely. Ansam Al-Kitaa is back behind the wheel, taking a driving class after a three year hiatus. In the reflection of the car door, the neighborhood's damaged buildings are visible. The driving school’s owners had bought this car only two months before the war, planning to expand the school. The war stopped all of it. Only a handful of students had trained on it before it was damaged during the bombing. The car was left with its windows shattered and various mechanical faults, its owners forced to replace the broken glass with plastic sheeting just to get it back on the road. I look at the car now and feel it resembles Gaza itself: new, full of promise, battered by the war, but still moving with whatever means are available. Its owners still try to keep it on the road, just as the people of my city try to keep living. Al Shati Driving School’s director, Ihab Shaheen, tells me that Gaza’s driving schools face unprecedented challenges: an ongoing shortage of diesel and gasoline, sharp increases in the price of motor oil and spare parts, and widespread road destruction. Barely a day goes by without one of their fleet’s cars breaking down or a tire getting damaged. Sometimes they’re forced to use burnt or recycled oil just to keep the cars running, though they know it damages the engines, Shaheen says. But even when a car stops running entirely, they don’t let it go to waste. Shaheen and his team dismantle the vehicle and use whatever parts are still usable to repair the cars that are still on the road. Scavenging from a dead car is often the only way to keep a living one moving: A spare part that used to sell for around $300 before the war now costs around $1,300. Before the war, cars outnumbered people. Today they’ve become rare. The school’s fleet has diminished, too: It owned 10 training cars before the war, but only four remain functional. Three were taken out of service after direct bombing damage, while the rest need constant maintenance. Instructors have learned the safest routes by trial and error, now choosing paths with less damage to avoid potholes and rubble scattered across the streets, protecting the few working cars they have left. Palestinians remove a car from the street after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, Tuesday, June 2, 2026. (Photo by Abdel Kareem Hana / AP) Before the war, I imagined getting my license would mark the start of a new chapter: driving my own car to work, moving freely through Gaza’s streets. The war stole those dreams, as it stole so many things we had taken for granted. But Gaza has not stopped moving. The instinct to rebuild, to improvise, to persevere runs through the rest of the city, just as it does at my driving school. UN teams have established two rubble recycling centers in Gaza to turn war debris into construction materials, while a feasibility study is underway to examine whether 57 million tons of rubble could be recycled to reclaim coastal land. The organization Architects for Gaza is working with Gaza’s municipality on community-led reconstruction proposals for specific destroyed sites, including the Yarmouk Cultural Complex. Meanwhile, on the ground, residents are clearing their own streets by hand, collecting and repurposing debris, and improvising informal transport networks in the absence of functioning infrastructure. Horse-and-cart setups have spread widely. Residents have built their own tuk-tuks and bicycles, which have replaced ambulances, delivery services, and taxis. People are recycling spare parts salvaged from destroyed vehicles. Some drivers have resorted to running vehicles on cooking oil instead of diesel; others extract makeshift fuel by burning plastic materials. They’re workarounds nobody would choose, but they keep people moving when nothing else will. They bring me hope – and then, when I think of the scale of the destruction, despair. Sitting behind the wheel again in a city rebuilding its own roads by hand, I navigate places I no longer recognize. In Gaza now, nobody is checking to see if I have a driver’s license. The roads barely exist. The traffic signals and street signs are missing. I keep driving anyway. This story was published in collaboration with Egab. Ansam Al-Kitaa is a Palestinian journalist based in Gaza. For years, she has covered the successive wars in Gaza and their humanitarian and social impacts for international and local outlets. 2026 Solutions of the Year magazine Add to the Discussion Next City sustaining members can comment on our stories. Keep the discussion going! Join our community of engaged members by donating today. Already a sustaining member? Login here.