The future of Gaza’s recovery may rely on solar power

The first time Majd Mashharawi left her native Gaza was in 2017, to visit Tokyo. Her flight landed late at night, and she was struck by the airport’s many glittering lights. Then when she got to the urban core, she was astonished. “This is the life people have outside Gaza?” she thought. “Why don’t we have this life?”

Growing up, Mashharawi had been accustomed to life with inconsistent power — as little as three hours a day. “It’s not easy to describe unless you live it,” she said. “Your life is completely messed up. Everything is controlled by others. Your life is controlled by when power is on and off.”

Last week, Israel cut off all electricity to the Gaza Strip in an effort to strengthen its hand against Hamas in ceasefire talks. But in fact, the two parties’ dysfunctional relationship around energy has a long history. In 2007, after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, Israel established a land and sea blockade. This included electricity: Israel came to control 10 power lines running into Gaza, as well as the diesel fuel needed to run its one power plant. The blockade also gave Israel gatekeeping power over any materials — cement, steel, batteries — needed for domestic infrastructure, if Israeli authorities judged they could help militants.

Israel’s security establishment thought this hammerlock over Gazan energy meant leverage over Hamas, said Elai Rettig, a lecturer in energy politics at Bar-Ilan University. As for Hamas, many Gazans felt the group was more interested in its crusade against Israel than addressing public works.

For the people of Gaza, the conflict meant energy poverty. The Strip’s combined power resources could at best meet a quarter to a third of demand. This translated to daily power outages averaging 12 to 16 hours a day. Even worse, Mashharawi said, the outages were unpredictable — whenever the power flicked on, you had to scramble. This maddening unreliability landed especially hard on women, who had to jam all their chores into these fleeting windows of opportunity.

But over the last decade, as solar prices tumbled worldwide, more Israeli leaders started thinking that getting solar into Gaza had a strategic benefit. Gaza’s energy dependence wasn’t cheap. Years of Palestinian counterparties failing to pay Gaza’s power bill — for financial and political reasons — had by 2023 racked up a debt to Israel of 2 billion shekels, about $500 million.

In 2016 and 2017, Israel approved about 100,000 solar panels to enter Gaza, according to researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Satellite imagery soon showed solar arrays sprouting on thousands of buildings across the Gaza Strip, especially in crowded areas like refugee camps.

Around the time of Mashhawawi’s trip to Tokyo, she’d been working to start a company that manufactured Gaza’s war rubble into bricks. But her production lines were being constantly kneecapped by the start-stop of the grid. It occurred to her that unreliable power was not just a burden in households, like the one she grew up in. Thousands of businesses across Gaza — restaurants, workshops, bakeries — yearned for a source of energy more reliable than what they had. Mashharawi decided to get into the energy business.

She started Sunbox, a social enterprise promoting solar power, in 2017, working doggedly with Israeli authorities to get the equipment approved. She started by selling small arrays — 1 kilowatt and up, about enough to power a home with a small fridge — to families. She soon helped supply bigger projects. Sunbox equipped 20 small desalination plants, the engines of Gazan water production, with solar. It set up solar-charged streetlights so girls could feel more confident walking to school in the wee hours.

Large international organizations like the World Bank and U.N. were also getting in the game, decking hospitals and schools in solar. A 7-megawatt system, partly financed by the International Finance Corporation, or IFC, got bolted onto the Gaza Industrial Estate, a manufacturing complex. The IFC said the smoother power supply made it possible to expand output and hire workers.

It was a renewable revolution born of political dysfunction. The total number of solar arrays in the Gaza Strip vaulted from about a dozen in 2012 to 8,760 in 2019, mostly in the form of small rooftop systems. The extraordinary growth made the Occupied Palestinian Territories one of the fastest-growing renewable energy markets in the world. By 2023, solar represented 25-40 percent of daytime power generation on the ragged Gazan grid, Rettig, of Bar-Ilan University, estimated.

Then came October 7, 2023. Mashharawi was abroad at the time on business travel. She spent the first two months of the war calling in favors and trying to get her family to Egypt. Meanwhile, Sunbox’s offices and warehouses were destroyed. Mashharawi is mourning the loss of a dear coworker, Mahmoud Abushawish, who she said was venturing north to help a school set up solar — and find some candy for the kids.

Israel’s military assault on Gaza has taken at least 48,000 lives and left its infrastructure in tatters. In February an interim assessment, led by the World Bank, estimated $53 billion in reconstruction needs. It said that 80 percent of Gaza’s power infrastructure is wrecked and that Gazans have experienced a “near-total blackout” since the start of the war. Because Gaza’s water supplies depend on energy to pump and purify it, availability has fallen to sub-critical levels. “There is no water and no electricity. It is stunning just how much damage occurred there,” Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, told Axios after visiting the territory in January.

A ceasefire signed in January, which has been roughly observed even as its first phase expired March 1, has paused the bombing for now. But talks to end the war haven’t gained traction, and many sense that Israel’s ultra-right-wing government, emboldened by Trump’s return, wants to resume fighting. Meanwhile, today most of Gaza’s 2.1 million people live in desperate conditions in displacement camps and other makeshift shelters, often exposed to the elements and possessing minimal access to basic services. Humanitarian groups are begging Israel and the international community to preserve the ceasefire and rush aid to improve conditions at these camps — hopefully, as a precursor to reconstruction.

With Hamas weakened, world powers are deciding the future of Gaza. In February, Trump whimsically proposed to empty Gaza of Palestinians and redevelop it as a luxury riviera. The idea won plaudits from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and categorical rejection by America’s Arab and Western allies. Trump’s vision is out of step with the majority of governments and experts who think that the reconstruction of Gaza can, and should, be done in a way that empowers Palestinians to live better lives on their land, without posing a threat to Israel.

Energy access is minimal in Gaza today. But solar has become one of the few ways to get it. About half of the electrons Gazans are using today come from solar power, according to a December estimate by the Shelter Cluster, a group that coordinates among aid organizations working in Gaza. The other half is coming from diesel, the customary fuel for post-disaster scenarios, but aid groups say Israel is withholding the necessary supplies.

With virtually no new hardware getting in, Gazans have created an internal economy for used cleantech. Solar units and their peripherals are being ripped from roofs, salvaged from rubble, and sold on Facebook. In the many camps of internally displaced people now dotting the strip, you’ll see solar panels leaning against walls and chairs — facing the sun. Some serve commercial ends. “You can find a guy with one panel, and a table, and his business is actually to charge cell phones and to charge batteries,” said one 55-year-old Gazan whose family has been displaced several times during the war.

The aid groups serving these encampments are hoping the most violent stage of the war is past and that they can switch to establishing basic services: food, water, shelter and critical health care. With diesel supplies scant, some are trying to import solar-powered gear instead. The U.N. Development Programme wants to deploy 1,100 prefab housing units, each equipped with a kilowatt of solar and rudimentary plumbing, as part of a $27 million program. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement that setting up off-grid photovoltaic systems is crucial to restoring agricultural activities like irrigation and cold storage.

Jumpstarting Hope in Gaza, a coalition of Palestinian, Israeli, and international NGOs, is supporting Palestinian-run IDP camps with 12,000 people in the south of Gaza with goods and equipment. The group aspires to set up a suite of solar-powered services — electricity, wastewater treatment, even units that produce drinking water from the air — to make them self-sufficient, dignified places to live during reconstruction, whenever that should begin. But in actuality, only a bit of traditional equipment got in before the ceasefire, and all equipment entries have stopped since then, said David Lehrer, a co-leader of the initiative.

Though the war isn’t formally over, many Gazans are returning to their homes, or the places their homes once stood. Some are beginning the early work of clearing rubble and laying to rest the bodies they find — a glimpse of the immense mourning that lies ahead.

As for the longer term, powerful parties are already competing to advance their respective visions of reconstruction. This month, Egypt, along with the 21 other members of the Arab League, issued a plan meant to counter Trump’s “riviera” concept. It proposes building 2,500 megawatts of power generation — about 20 times what Gaza had before the war — including solar, wind, and fossil-fuel generation. They’re not alone in envisioning Gaza as a renewable-energy powerhouse. The Palestinian Authority, which hopes to replace Hamas as Gaza’s ruling body, is developing a master plan of infrastructural priorities to be finalized with the World Bank, European Union, U.N., and Arab States. Wael Zakout, the Authority’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, has said solar and wind farms across Gaza could make it “the first region in the world to reach zero carbon emissions.”

Another idea that’s been mooted — one that Trump endorsed in his first term — is to build a solar farm in the sun-blasted deserts of the Sinai, just across Gaza’s southern border. Proponents say this has twin benefits: It frees up land in Gaza for other uses, and because it’s in Egypt, Israel’s not likely to target it.

But renewable energy won’t be the only resource considered for the repowering of Gaza. A modestly sized natural gas field was discovered offshore of Gaza in 2000. Political and economic conditions kept it from being developed, but the U.S., Egypt, and Israel have described it as an untapped energy reserve for Gaza. In November 2023, Amos Hochstein, a Middle East envoy for President Joe Biden and a former energy executive, said “as soon as we get to the day after and this horrible war ends, there are companies willing to develop those fields.” Supporters say gas-fired electricity would bolster Gaza’s overall energy supply and enable major new industrial infrastructure, like desalination plants and wastewater treatment, that would improve everyday life.

Josef Abramowitz, an Israeli-American solar developer who’s worked with Palestinian partners before, thinks the emphasis on large projects loses the decentralized character that has proven the most successful in Gaza. “The story of Gaza is: big projects that don’t get done,” he said.

Abramowitz’s favored model is minigrids: localized networks of solar panels and battery storage, which he said can supply round-the-clock energy at a fraction the cost of gas-fired generation. They’re flexible, sustainable, and — important in the Gazan context of blockade, frequent war, and poor governance — feasible with or without a grand resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

As for Mashharawi, she said her vision for reconstruction involves something a lot more basic than energy: peace and quiet.

“One to two years from now, where are we going?” she said. “We don’t want to keep building and rebuilding things that are destroyed.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/the-future-of-gazas-recovery-may-rely-on-solar-power/.

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