Searching for the bare minimum necessities of life has become a basic demand for Gaza’s residents.

Harsh scenes and painful moments dominate Gaza.

In the Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, children no longer run after a ball or hide in the camp’s alleys to play like children elsewhere in the world. Instead, they now stand in long lines, waiting their turn to fill empty containers from a mobile water tanker. They carry hoses heavier than their small hands, and stare at the water as if it were a rare treasure, not a simple right of childhood.

Instead of their days being filled with laughter and play, their hours are now drained by the search for the most basic necessities of life: a clean drink of water, a bucket that can last a family for a single day, and a drop that might ease the worry of a mother exhausted by fear for her children. In Gaza, the very shape of childhood has changed, and its details have become tied to survival, not joy.

Long and painful stories.

Despite the fragile truce that has somewhat silenced the sound of shelling, suffering has not stopped. Even if the guns have fallen silent temporarily, the war continues to leave its wounds open in destroyed homes, exhausted faces, and hearts living in constant fear of the return of fire at any moment.

In the eyes of children standing by the water tanker, long stories of deprivation and waiting are hidden, along with questions they cannot answer: Why has water become a dream? Why has play turned into a postponed luxury? And why are they growing up faster than their age, simply because life in Gaza does not give them time to remain children?

This is how Gaza’s days pass — between a truce that offers no reassurance, a life that does not resemble life, and children who are supposed to carry their toys to the streets, but instead carry plastic containers in search of water… in search of the bare minimum of their right to survive.