Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

While the world debates whether Palestinians deserve electricity, young people in Gaza are building tech incubators from the rubble.

Not one. Three.

Taqat began with a single solar panel and a car battery. A flicker of light in a blackout zone. Today it is Gaza’s largest incubator: three hubs — Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat — sustaining more than 400 freelancers, creating over 100,000 hours of work each month, and keeping alive the possibility of a future Israel is determined to erase.

This is not “resilience.” This is refusal.

Empire’s Favorite Word

Western NGOs and donors love to say “resilience.” It is how they launder complicity. It is how they celebrate survival without ever naming the hand on the trigger.

But nothing about Taqat is resilience in that empty sense. Taqat is resistance. It is infrastructure under siege. It is solar panels standing in for a bombed-out grid. It is adolescents coding while their schools lie in rubble. It is Gaza insisting: we will not disappear.

What They Built While the World Looked Away

The numbers themselves are an indictment:

$500,000 in monthly earnings by Gaza freelancers.

100,000 hours of digital work produced every month.

50 new jobs created.

2,000 people on a waitlist, desperate to join.

All of this in a place where:

80% of the population is unemployed.

1.9 million people are living in tents.

© CounterPunch