Sheikh Radwan, Gaza – Earlier than Abu Qasai Qaddoura can start appearing, he has to seek out one thing to burn.
At six within the morning, the 42-year-old walks to a stall in Sheikh Radwan, the place his household has been displaced, to purchase firewood. It prices seven shekels ($2) per kilogram. When he can’t afford it, he scavenges for one thing else to burn – cardboard, plastic or items of wooden salvaged from destroyed houses.
He lights a small fireplace so his household can maintain heat and prepare dinner a meal. He then washes the black soot from his arms earlier than leaving his dwelling for rehearsal.
The journey takes two hours on foot. Qaddoura avoids a foremost street clogged with rubble and the place he says Israeli gunfire poses a hazard, taking facet streets as an alternative.
By the point he reaches the rehearsal house – a makeshift fabric-and-plastic tent pitched within the automotive park of Gaza Metropolis’s Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Centre, his knees damage and he struggles to catch his breath.
“I arrive on the rehearsal. I’m exhausted however instantly get to work as a result of we don’t even have time for a brief break,” he says.
Weary and quiet, Qaddoura sits slumped as he speaks, his arms resting closely on his knees. On stage, he performs a physician trapped inside a Gaza hospital. The infant doll cradled in his arms is his character’s son. There isn’t any anesthetic. He should amputate the kid’s leg himself. The infant dies.
The scene is predicated on the real-life expertise of a father in Gaza, whose video the actors have watched.
Till now, Qaddoura had by no means acted. Earlier than the battle, he labored behind the digital camera as a manufacturing supervisor and sound technician for native media firms. Israeli airstrikes in northern Gaza destroyed his dwelling in al-Tawam.
Now he and his spouse, together with their kids – Ghazal, 15, Qusai, 12, and Sham, seven – stay in a single room on the rooftop of a rented home, sheltered by a plastic tarp.
When he holds the kid throughout rehearsal, the face he sees just isn’t at all times the character’s son.
“I wasn’t simply taking part in a personality; I used to be gazing my very own kids’s faces,” Qaddoura says. “Each time I held that little one on stage, terror gripped my coronary heart that tomorrow this could possibly be considered one of my very own sons. I couldn’t cease the tears as a result of the worry felt too actual.”
On stage, Qaddoura doesn’t break character. He retains holding the boy till director Ali Abu Yasin requires them to cease.
Then he collapses into sobs, and the rehearsal stops. For quarter-hour, Qaddoura sits quietly together with the stage, sipping water, unsure whether or not he can carry out it once more.
“I remembered my very own kids, and the way a father may stand helpless and damaged earlier than his little one’s wound,” he says afterward.
Ultimately Ali Abu Yasin, the play’s director, calls the actors again. Qaddoura will get on his ft, takes his place and does all of it once more.
Constructing a theatre
That is what Abu Yasin has requested his actors to do: take experiences they’re already struggling to outlive and switch them into theatre.
Abu Yasin speaks calmly and intentionally, even amid the chaos surrounding the manufacturing. He has spent 37 years as an actor, playwright and director, coaching generations of performers in Gaza. His productions have travelled past the enclave to nations together with Egypt and Tunisia, the place he gained a greatest actor award on the Tunis Worldwide Theatre Competition.
However the theatrical panorama he constructed his profession on has been steadily disappearing. Al-Mishal Cultural Centre was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in 2018. The Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Centre in Gaza Metropolis was broken in Israeli assaults in 2023. By March 2026, UNESCO had verified injury to 164 cultural websites in Gaza since October 7, 2023, together with 128 buildings of historic or creative curiosity.
For Abu Yasin, the issue was now speedy: The place do you produce theatre whenever you now not have a theatre?
His play 50 Minutes in Gaza started in April 2026 as a theatrical writing workshop supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Basis. Fourteen younger women and men have been purported to take part. Because the battle continued, some have been wounded and left Gaza for therapy; others have been displaced or unable to make the journey.
Eight ultimately made it into the manufacturing.
They’d initially joined to study the craft of writing for the stage. However as soon as the script was completed, the contributors determined to carry out it themselves.
The inspiration lined primary manufacturing prices and gave the performers a small honorarium for his or her work, relatively than a wage. Qaddoura says his household in any other case survives largely on humanitarian assist. Abu Yasin insists cash wasn’t what stored the actors making harmful, exhausting journeys to rehearsals.
As an alternative, he says, the work grew to become a type of psychological and emotional launch: a approach for the actors to course of what they have been dwelling by and finally, to supply an analogous outlet to audiences enduring the battle round them.
“We’re bizarre people, working after clear water, electrical energy, meals vans and a livelihood so we will survive amidst skyrocketing costs,” Abu Yasin says.
“However after we step onto the theatre stage, we really feel extra alive.”
At first, there was no stage.
The actors squeezed into material tents pitched immediately on scorching asphalt within the automotive park of the Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Centre, the place the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate had established its tent and website.
Displaced households lived on the opposite facet of the canvas. The air smelled of sweat, mud and burning plastic. Arguments and visitors drifted inside. Above them was the persistent buzz of Israeli reconnaissance drones.
After 12 days, amid gunfire within the space, the corporate moved once more.
This time they rehearsed inside a small partitioned room in Ajwa cafe, {a partially} broken constructing in central Gaza Metropolis.
There was no air flow. Electrical energy was unreliable. Music was performed from a cell phone.
And there was nearly nothing from which to construct a set.
With timber scarce and more and more invaluable as firewood, the actors gathered items of wooden and broken tent canvas. With the assistance of a displaced craftsman, they constructed the set themselves.
“While you ask me about difficulties, it appears the higher query is: What was accessible or regular?” Abu Yasin says.
“The issue was in the whole lot; the work actually emerged from below the rubble, its set got here from tents, and the actors have been nonetheless dusting gunpowder off their our bodies.”
Some actors, like Qaddoura, walked for hours by destroyed streets to succeed in him, arriving with rubble mud on their garments.
Then they started pretending to be individuals trapped by battle.
Studying the sounds of the sky
At some point in Could, actress Iman Ouda was rehearsing a scene the place she performs a pregnant lady named Haneen. Her character has tried to conceive for 9 years, and now she is trapped inside a hospital, giving beginning below siege.
In the course of the scene, an explosion struck close by, hitting a constructing and blowing mud into the rehearsal house. The actors lined their mouths and noses and rushed exterior. Then, nearly as one, they reached for his or her telephones.
“When the place shakes from a close-by bombing, we cease instantly,” Qaddoura says.
“I rush to my cellphone to name my household, and resulting from weak community protection, I stay by minutes of true terror.”
Solely after they confirmed their households have been protected did they return inside to proceed rehearsals.
At 25, Ouda has been appearing for six years. Calm and expressive in dialog, she sits upright as she speaks, punctuating her phrases with mild, centered gestures. Battle has taught her one other talent: distinguishing the sounds above her.
When Apache helicopters or reconnaissance drones drew nearer, she says, the actors typically stored rehearsing. Their eyes would briefly gaze in the direction of the sky or meet throughout the room.
“The connection between my actual self and the function is worry,” she says. “Would I end the present and return dwelling, or what would occur? I grew to become an individual who fears the whole lot, loss and pleasure alike.”
Generally, it took solely a reputation to deliver that worry and loss speeding again.
When Abu Yasin launched a personality known as Lacking Youssef, Ouda started to cry. Her personal father was named Youssef. He had been killed in the course of the battle. Later, Israeli forces bulldozed the cemetery the place he had been buried; his household may now not find his grave.
For Tamer Najm, one other actor, the resemblance between life and script got here by fatherhood.
Najm, 35, performs Khaled, a person who has spent years making an attempt to have a toddler together with his spouse, solely to seek out himself trapped in a hospital throughout their ultimate IVF try.
Earlier than the battle, Najm had saved for years to purchase an residence in Gaza Metropolis’s Nasser neighbourhood. The residence was destroyed.
He and his pregnant spouse moved between mates’ houses, his in-laws, sidewalks and tents. Their second little one was born in the course of the battle.
“I used to be not appearing the character of ‘Khaled’; I used to be dwelling him,” Najm says.
“I had truly been displaced with my pregnant spouse from the north amidst fireplace and hazard, terrified each second that she may lose her child.”
Each time Najm left for rehearsal, his spouse apprehensive about whether or not he would return. Earlier than leaving, he would inform her: “In the event you hear a close-by bombing, don’t go exterior; deal with your self and the infant.”
Then he would stroll out to play a person afraid of shedding his household. “We left with our arms on our hearts, realizing that stepping out in Gaza means returning both safely or in a shroud.”
But for Najm, staying dwelling was not essentially the safer alternative emotionally. After shedding his dwelling and being repeatedly displaced together with his pregnant spouse, he noticed performing as a approach to withstand despair and course of what he had lived by. Theatre, he felt, allowed him not solely to confront however to doc his personal trauma – and to hold one thing of Gaza’s expertise past the locations the place they have been dwelling it.
Opening night time
Ultimately, Abu Yasin discovered them a stage.
The A.M. Qattan Basis supplied its cultural centre on Al-Wehda Road in Gaza Metropolis. The centre had been closed and unavailable in the course of the early levels of the venture due to the safety state of affairs, extreme energy outages and injury within the surrounding space.
In any case, Abu Yasin says, the venture had begun merely as a writing workshop: The corporate solely approached formal cultural venues as soon as the script was full, the actors had been solid and the work was prepared to maneuver onto a stage.
A number of of the actors had carried out there earlier than the battle. After months of tents, asphalt and cramped rooms, they have been again inside a theatre.
Simply days earlier than opening night time on July 19, an Israeli missile struck close by throughout rehearsal. The constructing shook, whereas scraps of particles fell from the ceiling. Then got here the screams from exterior.
5 individuals have been killed close by, Gaza medics reported to native press.
On July 19, they ready for his or her first viewers.
By 4:30pm, individuals have been filling the roughly 150-seat auditorium. Admission was free.
Behind the scenes, Ouda was trembling. “I used to be so afraid the electrical energy would reduce out, or {that a} close by bombardment would occur and pressure us to cease the play mid-performance.”
There have been no elaborate costumes. They wore on a regular basis garments gathered from displacement tents and utilized what make-up they’d in cracked mirrors and by the sunshine of their telephones.
At 5pm, the lights went down.
Qaddoura stepped onto the stage and have become the physician who couldn’t save his son. Ouda grew to become Haneen, giving beginning below siege. Najm grew to become Khaled, making an attempt to guard the household he had waited years to have.
For 50 minutes, the actors carried out variations of lives they’d carried with them into the theatre.
Amongst these watching was Najm’s five-year-old daughter, his elder little one. His second little one, the infant his spouse had been carrying throughout their displacement, had been born in the course of the battle.
She cried when she noticed her father onstage, lined in mud and wearing torn garments. Afterward, she took one of many prop dolls into her arms.
“Dad, I cried after I noticed you crying on stage since you regarded identical to you do at dwelling whenever you get careworn or fear about us.”
His spouse informed him: “I didn’t really feel like I used to be watching an actor; I used to be watching you and our actual struggles at dwelling. It felt as if you opened the entrance door of our home to your complete viewers.”
The play went on tour by Gaza in late July by to August, with performances in Daraj, Deir el-Balah, Nuseirat and Khan Younis. At a marriage corridor in Khan Younis, the corporate says greater than 500 individuals attended.
“This efficiency was a message to the occupation that destroyed all of Gaza’s theatres: Theatre can’t be destroyed,” he says.
“It requires theatre makers, writers and administrators, and even when the halls are destroyed, we will carry out on the street.”
Because the cotton-sheet curtain falls and the stage lights go darkish, Qaddoura’s 50 minutes are over.
He gathers his household and begins the journey dwelling. His seven-year-old daughter Sham has fallen asleep, so he carries her.
Outdoors, the streets are darkish. The household makes use of their cell phones to gentle the way in which as distant shelling sounds throughout Gaza.
After they attain the rooftop room the place they’re staying, Qaddoura places Sham down. The opposite kids are nonetheless ready to eat.
So he returns to the duty that started his day. Qaddoura lights a hearth. Then he and his spouse start cooking dinner.
