Around two months ago, my family and I returned home to our apartment on Tal al-Hawa street in Gaza City after a day of visiting relatives. The apartment was lit only by a small battery-powered lamp that cast a dim glow over the space.
Later that night, when I went to the bathroom to wash up, I opened the door and a large rat, about 5 inches long, was staring back at me from behind the sink.
I shut the door immediately behind me and killed it with a small bucket.
There was blood on the floor. I put the body in a plastic bag and cleaned the tiles with diluted bleach, the only disinfectant we had. A few meters away, our two-month-old son, Amjad, was sleeping. He came to us after nearly 16 years of waiting.
That night, the sounds began. Scratching behind the walls, rustling movement in the ceiling. Something alive, something in there. My wife and I did not sleep that night, and on subsequent nights would take turns staying awake to keep an eye out for rodents.
The next morning I went to al-Zawiya market in central Gaza to find poison. The market is 5 kilometers from our home, and I walked half the way because it is so difficult to find transportation.
The market I remember, though, is now gone.
Most of the original shops and narrow covered alleys have been severely damaged or reduced to rubble. Sewage runs through the streets, and flies hover over stagnant water.
Makeshift stalls of crates and plastic sheets have replaced the shops; instead of organized rows, the market now comprises scattered clusters of vendors. Some of the stalls are set up beside or even inside tents where displaced families live.
A vendor, who asked to be identified by his initials only, M. H., sold me a 10-gram bag of poison for about $7.
He said that the most effective poisons are blocked from entry by Israel.
“What we’re selling now came from damaged warehouses,” he said.
Once that stock is gone, there will be no alternative.
“Families are buying what is available at four times the previous price,” he said.
I took the poison home, mixed it with a tin of sardines and placed it near the openings in our walls.
For two days, the rats disappeared.
Then they came back.
Purchasing some rubble
In Arabic, there is a saying: Many causes, one death.
In Gaza, we are witness to these many causes of death: airstrikes, hunger and contaminated water, to name a few.
And now, we see prospective death in the rats that move through the dark toward sleeping children.
They come out when the battery dies on the lamp and the apartment goes dark.
They come out when we are not around.
That is when they feel safe.
Our apartment building on Tal al-Hawa street was bombed just one week before the so-called ceasefire, in October 2025. Israel bombed the top three floors of the building, and the remaining three lower floors sustained partial damage.
We are on the third floor, and our apartment is missing some walls, the entire kitchen, all the windows and doors and most of the furniture.
Giant piles of rubble surround us on every side, and this is where the rats live.
Protecting our apartment from rats would be a monumental task.
With the poison not doing the job, I sought out construction materials myself, along with the help of friends, to repair and seal any openings in our house.
Yet, given the Israeli blockade on materials needed to repair or insulate homes – cement, timber and other “dual-use” items – this would not be an easy task.
All supplies have to be found through unofficial channels, so neighbors smuggle and sell cement and cinder blocks to each other, ripping what they can from collapsed walls and bombed-out homes.
My friend Islam Bakr, 55, helped me search for materials for days.
His own seven-story building, home to 30 apartments, in Gaza City’s al-Daraj neighborhood, had suffered damage from Israeli strikes as well. The stairwell is cracked, and parts of the upper floors remain exposed after nearby strikes.
As we searched for construction materials, he told me how the rats had invaded his family’s food stockpiles: flour, rice, cheese, yeast and dried legumes. This is food the family had obtained from aid trucks and markets and then stored because Gaza’s food supplies are scarce and unstable.
The rats nibbled away at their stockpile, contaminating the food. He found droppings in nearly every bag.
He recalled how a four-year-old child in a nearby tent was bitten; the family got treatment and the child recovered. But Islam said that it seems like most families do not seek medical attention unless injuries are severe, because getting to a hospital is its own ordeal.
Later that day, we found a group of people selling cement blocks and bricks that had been salvaged from destroyed homes. The blocks were displayed right in the middle of the street, amid piles of rubble.
The sellers had cleaned the blocks of any cement residue (typically, a clean brick fetches a higher price than a damaged, unclean brick). The seller would not negotiate on price, and he tacked on an extra fifty cents to cover transport costs.
I bought the used concrete blocks for about $2.50 each.
The ideal conditions for rats
The rodent infestation in Gaza is not a story of one statistic or figure, but of several of them combined: the 57.5 million tons of rubble that fill the streets; the approximate 3,000 cubic meters of solid waste that accumulate each day; and the inaccessible landfills and destroyed sewage treatment infrastructure.
In Gaza City, this collapse is visible along every street, especially in the piles of waste that are heaped along the street. At night, the smell intensifies, and it gets worse when residents burn garbage.
Rubble, waste and standing water have created ideal conditions for rodents.
Then, at night, they move into homes and shelters.
My friend Alaa Abu Sharkh, 45, lives in Beach Camp, a few kilometers from my home. His family had sought shelter in a house with an asbestos roof. When Israel bombed a nearby mosque, stones were blown outward and then fell through the roof, creating holes large enough for rats to simply walk through, into the house.
They framed the holes with wood and laid plastic sheeting over top, taping and then double-taping until the plastic held.
So far, this has worked to keep the rats out. But the problem remains outside.
During the night, Alaa sees clusters of rats moving through the rubble and waste piled along the road, scattering and then regrouping in the dark.
“This is not something individuals can solve,” said Alaa. “It requires [municipal] bodies with real resources.”
When we discuss the rodent crisis, it can at times feel absurd; we have survived the bombs of this war only to be living in the disaster that the bombs created.
Rat bite in the night
Over 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged by Israel’s bombardment over two-and-a-half years.
Even if Israel did not ban so-called dual-use items (like construction materials) that would enable us to repair our homes and protect them from rodents, nearly all of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents have been displaced, and many of them live in tents with no walls to patch up or cracks to seal.
Inside the tents, rodents are a part of daily life. For rats, every shelter is accessible.
I spoke with Yousef al-Ustaz on the phone after seeing a video on social media of his newborn son Adam, who had been bitten by a rat.
The family lives in a tent in the al-Maqousi area west of Gaza City, and at around 1 am, al-Ustaz woke to his son crying – not unusual for a newborn.
“As I got closer, I saw blood covering my baby’s face, and a rat running out of the tent,” al-Ustaz told The Electronic Intifada. “At that moment, I was thinking of nothing but saving his life.”
Adam was rushed to Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, where doctors treated the wound and monitored him for infection. He is now recovering from the bite.
I asked my nephew Omar al-Safadi, who is a doctor at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, whether he was seeing more rat-related admissions.
He said that medical centers in Gaza are receiving about one or two cases of bites or scratches each day, mostly involving children. Some develop infections requiring antibiotics.
“Around ten percent of cases develop infections that need close monitoring,” Omar said. “Most of what we’ve seen has been managed with disinfection and antibiotics. But the irregular availability of medicines is a major obstacle.”
What next?
When I got home, I began to fill in the cracks and holes where the rats were entering the apartment.
Instead of using the expensive and poor-quality cement available, I used a mixture of lime and sand, working by hand to fill any gaps in the walls with the used blocks I purchased.
It was crude, but it worked.
For now, the rats have stopped getting in.
Yet my wife and I sleep in the living room together with Amjad, surrounding him on all sides, in case they return.
Every night I go to sleep thinking about how I cannot make sure my son is safe. We survived the bombs, the displacement, the hunger, and now I am losing sleep over rats.
As if Gaza’s people had not already been asked to endure enough.
Originally published in Electronic Intifada
Sourced via: https://countercurrents.org/2026/05/when-the-lights-go-out-the-rats-come-out/
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