Twelve-year-old Heba Dawas lost her shoes in the chaos while fleeing an Israeli military offensive in Gaza.
So her carpenter father made her wooden-soled slippers, so she could walk more safely among the tons of rubble, hot sand and twisted metal of the besieged Palestinian territory.
“When we were displaced, we started running and our sandals broke,” said Heba, who lives with her family in a tent camp in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis.
“I took them off and started running. Our feet got very hot. So, we had to make slippers out of wood,” he said as he walked on the hot sand wearing his new shoes.
Her father, Sabar Dawas (39), came up with the idea after finding the cost of sandals too high. Now his daughter won’t have to walk barefoot among the ruins of Gaza.
“I had to make a different size for each daughter,” she said.
The demand for sandals
Soon his neighbours saw him making sandals and started asking him to make some for their children too.
He says he made them using basic carpentry tools at “a symbolic price.”
The sandals have a wooden sole and a rubber or cloth strap. But finding wood for these was a challenge as Palestinians needed it for cooking and lighting fires.
“Everything is hard to find in Gaza,” said Dawas, rubbing the sole of his slippers as one of his young daughters stood nearby and watched.
Making wooden slippers may ease the pressures of war, but life is still full of challenges in Gaza, where more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive against Hamas, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Gaza health officials say about 2 million people have been displaced, often repeatedly.
According to Israeli figures, Hamas launched the war on October 7 when the Palestinian group attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostage.
Since then, a humanitarian crisis has gripped Gaza, with Palestinians struggling to find food, water and fuel and wandering around seeking safe shelter.
The United States, Qatar and Egypt have failed to broker a ceasefire after several attempts.
The border with Egypt has been closed, halting the flow of aid and basic goods such as shoes.
“People are now walking around wearing mismatched shoes,” said Momen al-Karra, a Palestinian cobbler who repairs old shoes in a small market in Khan Younis.
“If the situation remains like this for two weeks or at most a month without opening the border, people will be left barefoot.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
