Employment is resistance in Gaza
Remote-work platforms take root in Palestine as freelance tech and creative workers navigate the wartime economy.
Ansam al-Kitta in Gaza City
For a full full five months after the beginning of Israel’s war in Gaza, engineer and programmer Sherif Naim had no income. “My laptop was in a bag for five months. I didn’t open it once,” Naim tells The Continent.
Before the war, about 12,000 people worked online in Gaza, unable to leave because of Israel’s blockade. Most of them stopped working altogether as war brought death, danger, electricity cuts, and internet blackouts.
“I was frustrated and depressed,” Naim says. As the war dragged on, he pitched to pre-war clients until he was commissioned. But electricity cuts made productivity impossible. “So I raised $2,500 to buy a solar panel, a battery, and an inverter.”
Naim has three decades of work experience and felt a responsibility to help others return to work like him. He contacted the Association of Engineers in Germany, which agreed to cover his rent for three months and the cost of a solar panel, allowing Naim to reassemble his old team of 10 to share his energy resources. Gaza City’s Taqat (“energies” in Arabic) was born.
Taqat now has wartime co-working space for 700 freelancers across three branches in Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Nuseirat. Its expansion was supported by a Turkish innovation fund, the Arab-German Cultural Center, and the Bank of Palestine.
Naim says it has arranged 150 work contracts for young people in Gaza and many other freelancers use its resources to do work they find independently online or from old contacts.
Freelancer Asmaa Felfel says that Taqat turned her life around. Like many people in Gaza, she is a jack of many trades: copywriter, project manager, audio transcriber, and translator.
Before the war, she made enough to live in a large home in Gaza City with her family. In November 2023, she was forced to leave that home with nothing but her laptop and a kitten.
For three months, Felfel commuted from Nuseirat to Deir al-Balah, offering her services, but to no avail. Her family was living on her savings, which were running out.
In May 2024, Felfel caught a break. She was offered a report-writing gig that she worked on day and night but, minutes before delivery, an Israeli shell struck next door. “I survived but I lost the job. I was back where I started.”
Then a friend introduced her to Taqat. “I found myself in an office, breathing a small part of the life that was forcefully taken from me,” Felfel says.
The success of initiatives like Taqat means Gaza’s freelance workforce may actually have expanded during the war.
Salsabeel al-Bardawil, 25, began a similar project, Gaza Talents, about seven months into the war to avoid falling into depression after her sister was killed in an Israeli attack. It was the second one to hit her family. In January 2024, within a week of their displacement from Nuseirat to Rafah, an Israeli airstrike killed al-Bardawil’s husband and her only child.
She has poured her grief into Gaza Talents, a tech platform and hub that brings together employees, freelancers, and clients. Companies can post job and freelance gigs and the hub will match them to workers in Gaza. Workers create profiles to showcase their previous work and, when they’re commissioned, Gaza Talents handles the financial transactions on their behalf.
“The platform also provides training for young talents who have skills but don’t know how to market themselves,” al-Bardawil says. Twenty-four people have secured full-time remote jobs through Gaza Talents and the platform has handled 564 projects for clients outside Gaza.
Incredible stories of resilience and determination ❤️🔥