With Gaza largely cut off from the outside world due to Israel’s war with Hamas, most people are homeless and destitute, and with few new goods arriving in the Palestinian enclave, shoemakers are busy repairing shoes for those who cannot replace them. .

There are very few new shoes in Gaza, and few people can afford the ones that are still for sale. But walking through the mud and rubble of the bombed-out enclave, where most cars are parked on dilapidated roads due to a lack of gasoline, wears out people’s shoes faster.

“We left Gaza City on foot, carrying nothing. No clothes, not even slippers. We spent some time in Khan Younis and then were displaced to Rafah,” said shoemaker Ahmed Hut as he mended his Ahmed Haboush said while flipping. .

Habush bought a used pair of flip-flops because new ones were too expensive, and took them to Ahmed Hohot’s roadside stand — a chair and a small table under a tarp — —to fix them.

“Before the war, we had less work, but now we are starting to have more work because people don’t have money to buy new ones,” Ahmed Hohot said.

“People are in very bad condition and there is no economy – very little,” he added.

The war began on October 7, when Hamas militants rampaged across the border, killing more than 1,200 people in Israel and taking 240 hostages. Health authorities in the Hamas-controlled enclave said Israel’s attacks on Gaza, which began on the same day, have killed more than 27,000 people.

Ahmed Hothot and other shoemakers work on the roadside without electricity, using hand tools, sewing kits and glue to mend shoes, slippers and sandals for a small fee.

“The slippers brought by the customer were completely damaged and we tried to help him and tried our best to repair the slippers for him. The sewing requires ordinary needles and awls. It is all done by hand,” Ahmed Hohot said.

For Um Wadith Abu Aser, it’s important to find shoes that don’t even fit for her children in the muddy streets of the new tent city of Rafah, home to her family and hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians.

The children were barefoot because they had outgrown their old shoes or had broken them during the chaos of escaping the Israeli bombing, but she managed to find some old flip-flops that a shoemaker could repair.

“People gave me clothes so I dressed my children. Some people gave me partially damaged slippers, but I managed,” she said.

“My children used to cry because there was glass in the street. My son fell down many times because of the glass. They made us walk on dirt and glass but what can I say, nothing can explain what we went through ,”she says.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)