As I lay on my modest bed, I feel darkness enveloping the small room just as it envelops our lives. I turn on my phone, trying to connect with the outside world, but my attempts fail due to the internet outages. I look around and think: how can an entire city find itself in such an endless battle for survival?
Every day, I face a reality far removed from everything written about artificial intelligence in the “developed” world. I see that world through my phone screen—videos of self-driving cars, AI hospitals, and smart cities—before the connection cuts and I’m back to my reality. Through that same small window, I glimpse a world where AI is flourishing, achieving breakthroughs in healthcare and education, while I live in Gaza, where we fight daily for the simplest necessities of life.
But here’s what the world doesn’t tell you: the same technology powering those breakthroughs is also powering the drones above us. The AI that saves lives elsewhere is being used to calculate exactly where to drop the next bomb on us. This isn’t progress we can’t reach. This is progress weaponized against us.
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I lived in Beit Lahiya, in a home that was reduced to rubble by mid-July 2024. I was forced to flee and find refuge in Sheikh Radwan. But fate had other plans, and on August 31, 2024, my refuge was also destroyed. Since then, I have been displaced multiple times, like everyone in Gaza, moving from one temporary shelter to another. Every day here feels like a lifetime—where every inch of land is filled with pain and every corner tells a story of loss.
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In the morning, sunlight sneaks in through my windows. Once again, I rely on worn-out solar panels to charge my phone. But here's what the world doesn't see: before the war, Gaza was covered in them.
Rooftop after rooftop, panel after panel—it was one of the most solar-dense places anywhere. Under siege, with electricity cut off by Israel, we innovated. Solar panels were our defiance, our way of saying: we will survive.
But survival, it seems, is also a target. Israeli airstrikes have systematically destroyed solar panels, water tanks, and anything that makes life possible. What remains now are cracked, barely functioning remnants of what was once an amazing advancement. These panels don't prove we are primitive. They prove that even our progress has been bombed back to the Stone Age.
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In Gaza's market, people wander in search of something to buy or sell. I saw a man passing a banknote through his hands—torn in ways that couldn't easily be fixed. Yet he was trying to fill it in with colored pencils, cutting its torn edges to make it usable. In a world where artificial intelligence is transforming economies, is this really our reality?
This torn currency isn't just money. It's us. We are torn, frayed at the edges, held together by makeshift solutions and sheer will. And while the world builds economies on algorithms and data, we rebuild ours with pencils and patience. Thinking about AI while watching this man isn't strange—it's the only way to measure how wide the gap has become. His hands, fixing a banknote, are the same hands that once dreamed of a future. Now they just try to make the present last another day.
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When I was a child, I went to school every day—Khalifa Bin Zayed School in the Beit Lahiya
Project. I remember the walk like it was yesterday: dusty streets in summer, muddy puddles in winter. I would wait for my cousin at the corner—same uniform, same backpack, same dream.
We walked together every morning, stopping to buy falafel sandwiches from the same vendor, the smell of fried bread and parsley following us all the way to the gate.
The school was old but alive. Chipped paint on the walls, voices echoing in the hallways, the smell of za'atar and olive oil from lunchboxes. A teacher once told us: "Education is the one thing they cannot take from you." We believed that. Despite the siege and occupation, Gaza was a beacon of learning. We believed that too.
Today, I watch the children in my neighborhood. They don't walk to school. They walk to
bakeries, hoping for bread. They walk to rubble, looking for anything useful. My cousin—the one
I walked with every morning—is gone. The war took him. And the children who once carried books now carry nothing but the weight of this war. Their eyes used to ask: "What will I be when I grow up?" Now they ask: "Will I grow up?"
In the rest of the world, professors worry about students using AI too much, that it will impact learning. In Gaza, students walk miles just to reach WiFi to submit a basic assignment. I've seen children whose eyes once sparkled with hope, now dimmed by the uncertainty of their next meal.
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In the evening, I tried to light a fire to get warm. It was harder than I expected—not because of the cold, but because I couldn't find a lighter. I thought back to the pile of lighters we used to have at home, the hundreds sold at the dukana on the corner. In an instant, one of the simplest tools in my former life became a sought-after technology.
I watched life in the street below from my window and recalled an article I had read about artificial intelligence: robots cooking food, self-driving cars, medical devices diagnosing diseases faster than humans. How can this world be at the world's fingertips, while we struggle to find lighters to make a fire?
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As I hear of a world transforming into an intelligent environment that manages itself, I wonder: are we in Gaza living in the same century? But the question isn't just about what we don't have.
It's about what they have turned against us. The drones above us are “smart.” The bombs that destroyed my cousin's home are smart. The system calculating who lives and who dies is smart.
While artificial intelligence is being used to revolutionize healthcare and economies elsewhere, here it is being used to revolutionize killing. These questions haunt me every day. It feels as though the world is moving on without us—and over us.
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Every day we live in Gaza serves as a reminder of how technology is not just a luxury, but a basic necessity for survival. While the world moves forward in the age of artificial intelligence, Gaza remains stuck in time, in a world lacking even the simplest necessities. But at the heart of this darkness, hope remains alive in each of us and in Gaza's ability to withstand these challenges, even if our tools are simple.
One day, Gaza might be an inspiration to the entire world. But for now, it serves as its darkest warning: a place where artificial intelligence is not a tool for progress, but a mechanism for extinction.