GAZA, (Palestine Foundation Information Center) Gaza nights are black. Overwhelming darkness blankets every home, every tent, and every grieving heart.
Electricity is no longer an intermittent service; It has been entirely erased from our choices. No generators run, and not a drop of fuel remains.
Gaza’s scary nights are lighted only with the blazes ignited by the Israeli airstrikes.
For almost two years, over two million Palestinians in Gaza have been living under a total blackout.
Home generators have fallen silent, their diesel tanks long emptied. Even central hospital generators, once the last line of resilience, are now gradually shutting down.
No alternatives. No timers, batteries, or emergency LED lights. Only suffocating darkness prevailing in every direction.
Life hangs by a thread
In Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City, Um Nader, 45, told our correspondent, “There’s nothing left working in the house. We can’t even charge a phone. We’re literally living in the Stone Age.”
Markets have shut down their refrigerators, hospitals have turned off life-saving equipment, and even water desalination plants have come to a complete halt.
Every aspect of life that once depended on electricity has vanished, leaving people trapped in a different kind of war—a cold war against darkness, thirst, suffocating heat, and a growing sense of hopelessness.
Unavoidable darkness
The generators, once a temporary lifeline, have now fallen silent.
Electrical technician Hassan Abu Riya, who runs a small repair workshop, says, “There’s no fuel, no money, and not a single sound of a generator. Most people have dismantled their cables and stored them away. There is no use for them anymore.”
In many neighborhoods across Gaza, even candles have disappeared from store shelves. People now use the dim glow of phone screens to light their tents and home corridors until their battery dies.
Fuel crisis threatens Gaza hospitals
At the intensive care unit of al-Shifa Hospital, several life-support machines have stopped functioning after the generators went down.
One doctor described the heartbreaking choices staff now face, “We’ve reached the point where we have to decide who gets to live and who we have to unplug. Not because we want to, but because there’s no electricity.”
The hospital administration has warned of a gradual shutdown of entire departments as fuel supplies run out, with the ongoing Israeli ban on the entry of fuel shipments.
Deliberate strangulation
In another home, a mother placed her infant near an open window, hoping he might catch a breath of air.
“There’s no fan, no air conditioning, no light. We’re living in darkness and dying slowly,” she says.
What Gaza is experiencing today is not an emergency. It is the latest, and perhaps cruelest, phase of a long-standing blockade—one that now takes the form of extinguishing life.
