When streets become a workplace: Gaza workers convert tents into offices

Gaza doctors, lawyers, and teachers have converted tents into offices to maintain a livelihood.

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Dr Mohammed al-Khalidi, a specialist in prosthetics and orthotics, continues to work from inside a tent after his private clinic was destroyed during the war, October 6, 2026 [Iyad Al-Qatrawi/Al Jazeera]

More than four-in-five buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since Israel’s genocidal war began in 2023, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), creating a real estate crisis.

The lack of office space has seen rental prices reach unaffordable levels for most Gaza professionals. But resilience, necessity, and duty have encouraged Palestinians to find solutions to this situation. Tents are now where lawyers meet clients, doctors treat patients, and traders sell their wares.

Repeated displacement

After Omar al-Tawashi, a civil engineer and construction auditor, saw his office destroyed in an Israeli air strike in August 2024, he began work from his home in July 2025. But that too met the same fate, so he shifted operations to a tent in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, to continue his work.

“My move to a tent was not a professional choice. It was a direct result of the destruction of the place where I used to work, compounded by the rental crisis, which made finding an alternative office extremely difficult,” he said.

“In some cases, rents have risen to more than 10 times their pre-war levels, making a new office beyond my means”.

The tent is not a suitable environment for his engineering work, but there is no alternative for al-Tawashi.

“There is heat, cold and noise, and none of the privacy needed when discussing projects or reviewing technical files,” Omar said. “But stopping work would mean losing my source of income”.

In the crowded market in Nuseirat camp, central Gaza, accountant Mahmoud Shaheen receives clients inside a small tent amid the sound of neighbouring vendors and passers-by.

Shaheen was once responsible for a Gaza-based company’s accounts, but the office was destroyed in an Israeli air strike in November 2025.

“Moving to a tent was not so much a professional choice as a response to a reality imposed by the war,” he told Al Jazeera.

With the start of the new school year in Gaza last month, tents have been pitched across the country as substitutes for schools destroyed in Israeli air raids or converted into refuges for the displaced.

School starts

Teacher Palestine Hussein has been forced to adapt to this new reality. She previously taught English at an educational centre in Bureij in central Gaza, which she had spent years building.

It was destroyed in seconds when an Israeli air raid destroyed the educational facility, so she now teaches children from a tent at al-Balata, a camp for displaced Palestinians in Nuseirat.

Merchant Khalil Al-Tahrawi displays clothing in a small tent by the roadside in the Nuseirat market after his shop was destroyed during the war, October 6, 2026 [Iyad Al-Qatrawi/Al Jazeera]

Repeated power cuts, unreliable internet and shortages of equipment have complicated efforts by Gaza’s business community to rebuild during this period of a relative decrease in bombing.

Customers, too, are changing their consumption patterns, heading to certain towns or camps for a particular good or service. Often what they find are prices more inflated than during Israel’s siege on Gaza before Israel’s genocidal war.

One customer, Mohammed Zweid, a 24-year-old IT worker, looks through a market in Nuseirat. “Accessing professionals in tents and temporary spaces is better than having no service at all,” he told Al Jazeera. “The transformation has changed not only where services are provided, but also how they are experienced.”