By Ghada Abdulfattah
IN the Gaza Strip, where the relentless grind of war has erased streets, homes, trees, neighbourhoods, and almost entire cities, firefighters and other civil defence workers have become more than first responders – they are lifelines in a world that has collapsed.
Before the war, Gaza’s firefighters mostly responded to routine emergencies – house fires, car accidents, and individual medical crises. Their work was challenging, but largely predictable. During previous wars – in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021 – they worked under difficult conditions. Still, nothing prepared them for the intensity, scale, duration, and relentless pace of the Israeli assault that began following Hamas’ October 2023 attacks into Israel.
For over 20 months now, Gaza’s firefighters have spent their time carving tunnels through bombed-out ruins trying to find survivors – and the bodies of people who have been killed – that are trapped underneath. During that time, Israeli airstrikes, bombardment, and ground operations have killed nearly 55,000 Palestinians in Gaza and injured over 125,000, according to the Ministry of Health – although the true toll of the war, including deaths from disease, denied medical care, starvation, and other conflict-related causes, is likely significantly higher.
The firefighters brave cratered roads when the sky rains bombs, racing to the scenes of airstrikes to quench the fires they spark with barely enough water. Their job is not just to extinguish flames – it is to try to wrest people from the brink of death.
“We used to save people from accidents,” said Yasser Amer, a 27-year-old firefighter. “Now, we’re pulling children from the debris.”
The New Humanitarian recently spent two days with Amer and the team of firefighters he is a part of. Their base is in al-Mawasi, along Gaza’s southern coast. Once a sparsely populated, sandy stretch of agricultural land, the area is now covered in tents housing displaced people as far as the eye can see. Israel unilaterally declared the area a “humanitarian zone” early in the war, although it continued to carry out attacks, but recently dropped the designation.
Multiple rounds of Israeli evacuation orders and assaults on cities over the course of the war have forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee here, and the area has become one of the main staging grounds for aid organisations and first responders in Gaza.
The team of firefighters is part of the Palestinian Civil Defence, a civilian agency – affiliated with Gaza’s Ministry of Interior – that is responsible for providing emergency and relief services. The Civil Defence force has been a key source of photos, videos, and initial death tolls following airstrikes during the current war, and Israel has sought to delegitimise the information it provides due to its affiliation with Gaza’s Hamas-run government. But the Civil Defence workers The New Humanitarian spoke to said they are impartial humanitarian workers who carry out their livesaving work in accordance with international humanitarian law.
In a war that has seen the indiscriminate – and sometimes allegedly intentional – killing of aid workers, journalists, and medical personnel, members of the Palestinian Civil Defence have not been spared. A staggering 113 have been killed, including six who were shot dead when Israeli soldiers massacred 15 first responders in Rafah on 23 March.
The New Humanitarian accompanied Amer and the team of firefighters as they tended to their equipment, rushed out to respond to emergencies, decompressed in their downtime, and shared stories of what they had borne witness to over the course of more than a year and a half of unrelenting war.
“They’ve seen hell”
On the first morning, the leader of the team, 44-year-old Ahmed Radwan, began his shift early, as he always does, by checking the two firefighting vehicles at the group’s base in al-Mawasi.
Broad-shouldered and with an easy smile, he joked with his team members and with children on the adjacent street as he went about the morning. A veteran firefighter of over 18 years, he was born in Rafah and raised his four children there until he was displaced and moved to al-Mawasi on the outskirts of Khan Younis, just a few steps away from where he now works.
The Civil Defence base itself is no more than three tents pitched together, improvised under the open sky. Uniforms, spare clothes, and towels are hung on lines strung between poles and tent stakes, drying in the sun. A small shack made of palm leaves sits close to the street. This is where the team gathers and boils tea over an open fire. They share jokes about their meagre salaries, which all too frequently arrive late, stories from days spent on the front lines, and wishes for the war and bloodshed to end.
As Radwan made his morning rounds, he tapped the tank of one of the red fire trucks. “There’s enough water,” he said, “but the battery doesn’t work.”
Each truck has a unique identification code on its roof and sides, which the firefighters share with the Israeli military through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in an effort to avoid being targeted. If the number is changed, “we immediately inform the ICRC who inform the Israeli side”, Radwan explained. “They know all our vehicles and their codes and have photos of them. They have no pretext to bomb us.”
He continued to clean the truck’s hood, tightened loose wires, and prayed it would not fail them. “These vehicles are outdated and have not been maintained,” he said, pointing to the truck’s broken windshield, cracked by an Israeli airstrike. “They’ve seen hell.”
Since the war began, no new firetrucks have been allowed into Gaza, and spare parts are extremely scarce. Even before then, the Israeli blockade, imposed since 2007, made maintaining the vehicles difficult, with simple pieces of equipment, like jumper cables, hard to come by.
Since October 2023, the wear and tear on the vehicles and the scarcity of resources for maintenance have become exponentially worse. The hardest period has been since the beginning of March this year, according to Radwan. This is when Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza, intensifying the shortage of supplies. Israel then unilaterally ended the ceasefire that had lasted for two months, resuming and stepping up its brutal assault.
During the massacre in March, Israeli soldiers crushed one of the Civil Defence’s fire trucks and buried it in the sand, along with five ambulances and a UN vehicle. Radwan knew the six Civil Defence workers who were killed well. “We didn’t lose one or two – we lost a whole shift,” Radwan said, his voice flat.
“We had personal ties – these weren’t just work relationships,” he continued. “Even during the war, our bond grew stronger than ever. We worked together closely. Samir Bahabsa, who was killed, was one of the bravest among us… Ibrahim Maghari (another one of those killed) once pulled twin babies from under the rubble. Despite the chaos, he refused to leave the site until he got them out alive.”
Radwan paused before adding, “It wasn’t easy to hear the news. It’s not easy to see how our lives have become so cheap – how we’re left unprotected, even though we should be [protected], like rescue workers everywhere else in the world.”
Chasing bombs
As the morning stretched on, some of the firefighters chatted in the palm-leaf shack, drinking tea. Others lounged inside one of the tents. Suddenly, a loud explosion broke the relative calm. The team immediately snapped into action, loading into one of the fire trucks without waiting for an emergency call.
“There are many times we move not because we were called, but because we heard the bombing,” Radwan later explained.
Internet and phone services have been cut off at different times, plunging Gaza’s 2.1 million residents into complete communication blackouts, and areas where active fighting is taking place are often blackout zones. This has forced firefighters and other first responders to become war-sensors.
“We’ve come to depend on the eye and on the ear – on what we see and hear,” Radwan said. “The sound of the explosion, the direction of the smoke, that’s how we find the next strike.”
When Civil Defence teams lose all contact with one another, it makes it nearly impossible to coordinate efforts or reach the injured in time, Radwan explained. “In the absence of communication, we had to improvise,” he said. “We began sending an ambulance to the hospital, where it would wait for wounded people who arrived first on donkey carts, tuk tuk, or private vehicles and tell us where the airstrikes had occurred.”
On the day of The New Humanitarian’s visit, that wasn’t necessary: The loud explosion, a plume of smoke rising into the sky, and crowds immediately rushing in the direction gave it away. It was coming from a cluster of tents behind the Kuwait Specialised Field Hospital –nearly two and half kilometres from the base.
When the firefighters arrived on the scene, the fire was raging. An ambulance was already there. Thick black smoke billowed into the air, people were running in all directions, and a man was dragging two children out of one of the burning tents.
Amid the chaos, Radwan, Amer, and another veteran firefighter, 52-year-old Raed Ashour, remained composed. “We have no option but to be calm amidst the panic we see,” Radwan said afterwards.
At the scene, he started giving instructions on what to do. With limited water in their tanks, the firefighters worked quickly to isolate the fire from other highly flammable tents that stood nearby. They doused the missile debris, cylinders of cooking gas – most of them empty – and anything else that could potentially spread the fire in water.
Their strategy: isolate, extinguish, cool. However, with access to water severely limited, they were careful to ration their supplies, saving as much as possible for the aftermath of the inevitable next strike. Using shovels, they dug into al-Mawasi’s sandy soil and used it to extinguish the flames.
Every second is a decision. “It’s a race against catastrophe,” Radwan said. “If we use all the water at once, we run out before we reach the source of the fire. If we go slow, the fire spreads.”
Once the fire was put out, the firefighters donned oxygen tanks to search the burned-out tents and the inside of a one-room building housing displaced people. “We searched every corner – but found nothing. Still, parents were screaming: ‘Where are the children?’. It felt like the Day of Judgment,” Radwan added. “This is not firefighting. It’s survival.”
Carrying memories
The following day, the firefighters were back at their base, prepared to respond to another emergency. As they sat around talking, the conversation drifted to past incidents. The hardest part, they said, isn’t the fire but what comes after. Many of the firefighters carry memories of the airstrikes they have responded to, down to the smallest detail.
Said Qishta, a 25-year-old member of the team, recalled the aftermath of an airstrike on the first night of Ramadan (12 March) last year. It was in the al-Janina neighbourhood east of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. The sky turned orange as homes burned. Among the dead were women and children – their bodies charred beyond recognition.
As Qishta searched the wreckage, a relative of the family whose home had been hit told him someone, a woman, was still missing. Qishta combed through the debris until the team had to leave. “I felt sad that I was leaving while someone was looking for somebody and hoping to find them,” he said.
Qishta and a colleague were returning to their truck when they noticed a slow drip of blood falling from above. He looked up and saw the woman’s body lodged in a tree, where she’d been thrown by the force of the blast. Using a ladder, they climbed the tree, and they asked neighbours to bring a blanket to cushion the body when it fell. “That’s all we had,” Qishta said. “No cherry picker, no harness. Just a ladder and a blanket.”
The colleague Qishta was working with was Samir Bahabsa, one of the civil defence members killed in the Rafah massacre.
Amer also recalled one of the first incidents he responded to after Israel began its assault in October 2023. A house had been hit by an Israeli airstrike, reducing it to a pile of fallen concrete and twisted metal. Somehow, a 15-year-old boy named Hammouda had survived. Buried under two and a half metres of debris and cradled in his mother’s arms, he clutched a cellphone in his hand that he had managed to use to call for help. His mother was already dead.
“I could hear him the whole time. He kept saying, over and over, that he couldn’t breathe.”
Amer remembers pressing his ear to the rubble, listening for Hammouda’s voice. He would tap gently with a hammer, careful not to accidentally cause a collapse. Finally, he heard Hammouda saying, “I can hear you.”
“I could hear him the whole time,” Amer said. “He kept saying, over and over, that he couldn’t breathe.”
There was no heavy machinery to use for excavation – just iron rods, a few shovels, jacks, and the firefighters’ trembling hands. For six hours, Amer and the team he was working with dug with these basic tools, guiding an oxygen tube and water underneath the rubble to keep the boy alive. Any misstep or shift in the debris could have crushed him. “But he never panicked,” Amer recalled. “He held on.”
Airstrikes thundered in the distance, and at one point, Amer had to leave to respond to another house that had been hit. Radwan and Samir Bahabsa carried on with the excavation until Hammouda was finally pulled up alive.
Last-hope-givers
After every strike the firefighters respond to, chaos follows. Parents scream the names of their children. When they arrive on the scene, families rush to the firefighters, shouting: “There are children inside,” Qishta said. “The grief and shock are so overwhelming that people forget who exactly was there.”
Amid the shock and horror, families lose track and struggle to account for all their members. “In my 18 years of experience, I have never seen someone who could memorise the names of his family members correctly,” Radwan said.
Often, families send loved ones to the hospital and then realise someone is missing. They return to the site, desperate. “There’s still someone under there,” they say. And the rescuers go back in.
Fortunately, the second day of The New Humanitarian’s visit with Radwan and his team was quiet. There were no strikes to respond to. But that was just one day. As long as Israel’s assault continues, there will be more emergencies to respond to, and more tragedy and death to bear witness to. Firefighters in Gaza have become more than first responders. They are grief-bearers, truth-tellers, and last-hope-givers.
“We see people at their worst moment,” said Qishta. “And still we have to keep moving. From one fire to the next. From one scream to another.”
Qishta narrowly escaped being killed in the massacre at the end of March. He used to work the same shift as the firefighters who responded that night. Two days before the massacre, he had rotated to work out of a different location.
“I should have been with them that night,” he said, of his former team, his eyes cast downward. “But I had moved to a new location. Just luck.”
Qishta recently had his first child – a baby boy. He named him Adam, wishing for him to have a better and brighter life than what his father had witnessed.
Radwan has stopped sharing what he sees in his missions with his four children, aged between three and 13, living in a tent in al-Mawasi near the base. “I wanted them to live their lives,” he said. “What they live and go through is already enough.”
After each mission, Amer calls home. “I’m fine. All is good. Stop worrying about me,” he said to his wife on the phone after returning from responding to the missile strike on the tents behind the Kuwait Specialised Field Hospital. “Let me talk to Sila,” he added softly. His daughter’s voice came through. “I’m fine, Baba,” she said. Amer smiled for just a moment. Then he put his helmet back on.
Edited by Eric Reidy.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
