Gaza City, Gaza Strip – For more than four hours, Hajj Rabhi al-Fairi, 79, has been standing outside his home in Gaza City with his children and neighbours waiting their turn to use a small generator. The generator’s owner pours in the fuel, starts a timer and switches on the machine. Each family gets a few minutes to operate a pump that pushes water up to a storage tank on the roof, before the generator moves on to the next house.
For al-Fairi and his neighbours, this is how they get water. We have to rent a generator,” al-Fairi tells Al Jazeera. Since the family returned to their home in October 2025, after fleeing a month earlier during Israel’s assault on their neighbourhood, the generator has become a familiar sight on the streets of Nassr.
When it arrives, residents gather around it, each carrying a jerrycan of diesel to operate the machine, which they have to pay for themselves. Their neighbourhood and home were badly damaged from years of Israeli bombing, with no municipal electricity or water supplies functioning. The family depends on an old pump – but without electricity, it cannot bring water up to the rooftop tank.
Each family needs only about seven or eight minutes to fill up their tanks, but with the number of flats in their building, the generator needs to be rented for about an hour. Al-Rabhi says families used to pay about 80 to 90 shekels ($26-30) to rent a generator for an hour. At different times, the price has risen to about 100 or 120 shekels ($33-40) an hour, excluding the cost of diesel.
Khalil Abu Ouda, 39, takes a machine mounted on a horse-driven cart from one house to another. The generator’s metal body is covered in black soot and grease, and white smoke rises from the engine when it operates. At each house, Abu Ouda connects long electrical cables to the water pump.
The cables stretch across the street as neighbours gather around the machine to wait their turn. For Abu Ouda, this machine is both a service for the neighbourhood and an essential source of income for his family. He says there are very few small, mobile generators, like his, left in working condition in Gaza.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
