On the pavement adjacent to a crowded shelter in the heart of the Gaza Strip, under the scorching sun, 11-year-old Aws sways from side to side, struggling to balance two gallons of drinking water, each weighing about 15 kilograms—half his own weight.
His bare feet sink into the sand mixed with rubble from destroyed buildings and street dust, while beads of sweat trickle down his forehead, forming dark lines on his face, a face prematurely stripped of its childhood features. Aws isn’t looking for friends to play with; he’s searching for a customer to buy his water delivery service on his rickety wooden cart for a few dollars. He returns to his family’s tent in the evening, collapsing with a weary sigh, and places his earnings in the hands of his mother, who lost her husband in an Israeli airstrike during the war on Gaza.
When the war ended, Aws didn’t return to the school desks destroyed in the fighting. Instead, he went to the market as a vital laborer, driving a large sector of the informal economy under tents and on the streets.
Aws is not an isolated case deserving of fleeting sympathy, but rather a stark example of child labor in Gaza. As the war entered its third year, child labor transformed from an emergency measure into an unavoidable survival strategy adopted by grieving and desperate families to secure the bare minimum of calories needed to stave off starvation.
