RAFAH — Abu Bilal grabbed a set of clothes that his wife had prepared for him. He left the tent he had moved to months earlier, heading towards the center of Rafah city, after his neighbors told him about a tailor there that could resize his and his family’s clothes.
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Finding a tailor in Rafah is not an easy task. The city streets changed dramatically after the influx of hundreds of thousands of displaced people. It has become difficult to recognize the city’s landmarks due to the tents pitched in every corner, and the open areas in and around the city.
Abu Bilal eventually managed to find a tailor to fix his clothes which had become too loose after he — like most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people — lost his weight.
The man handed over the clothes to the tailor, Akram. He sat on a waiting chair. He was willing to wait no matter how much time it took to adjust his clothes. There is no job waiting for him after he lost everything in the war. With no job since the war started in October, he depends on financial assistance from his brother, he said.
On the brink of famine
Abu Bilal, his wife and their six children fled their home in Tal al-Zatar in Gaza City amid Israel’s heavy bombardment of northern Gaza in the first weeks of the war. They have since lived in a tent in Rafah, as over a million Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes because of the war.
The war began on Oct. 7 when Hamas launched a complex cross-border attack on southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking 240 hostages. Israel then waged a massive air, naval and land campaign of bombardments that killed more than 36,000 people in Gaza and pushed the Palestinian enclave to the brink of famine with little aid allowed to be delivered to the starved population.
Over 80% of Gaza’s population were displaced, with over 1.4 million people crowded in Rafah and a narrow strip on the Mediterranean in the northern half of Gaza. The tragedy has exacerbated over the last month as Israel began a ground offensive on Rafah, defying global warnings.
”Suitable solution”
The tailor finished adjusting the clothes and handed them over to Abu Bilal. Many Palestinians resorted to adjusting or fixing their clothes as they are not able to buy new ones.
“The tailor provided us with a suitable solution … amid such conditions,” said Abu Bilal, who hopes the war stops so he can return to his home in Gaza city.
The tailor sets the fees of fixing and patching clothes according to the prices of materials in the market.
Given the lack of power, Akram, the tailor, now resorts to a manual sewing machine. It is very tiring for the 50-year-old man, especially with the increasing number of clients who want to alter or resize their clothes. Sometimes he handles 100 clients daily.
He has come up with an innovative way to operate his sewing machine by linking it to an old bicycle. His 18-year-old son rides the fixed bicycle to operate the machine.
Most of the clothes, Akram adjusts or resizes are for children, he said. But there are also clothes for displaced people who fled the bombardment with what they were wearing. “So they come to adjust the size or patch their clothes,” he said.
The dire conditions across Gaza are impacting children severely, especially in the overcrowded Rafah, which was described by UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder in March as “a city of children” with “600,000 boys and girls there.”
“Before this war, child wasting in the Gaza Strip was rare, with less than 1% of children under the age of 5 acutely malnourished,” he said at the time. “Today one in three children under two years are acutely malnourished.”
Scarce and expensive
The tailor sets the fees of fixing and patching clothes according to the prices of materials in the market.
“Everything is expensive,” he said, adding that clients found that fixing their old clothes is cheaper than buying new ones, especially amid the ongoing war. “They find in my work a solution to these difficult situations,” he said.
Everything is scarce in Gaza.
Nasim Muhammad is another tailor in Rafah. He also found a way to operate his machine through bicycle pedals.
The 20-year-old resident of Rafah says getting raw material is his major challenge now that he found a solution to the power outage.
Everything is scarce in Gaza. But Muhammed says he earns enough from sewing and fixing clothes to keep himself afloat — and that is a lot in comparison to what other Gazans are experiencing.
This reportage is produced in cooperation with Tinyhand, a platform that focuses on telling visual stories.
