After 3 years of war, looking for calm in a murky Gaza swimming pool
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Before Israel’s invasion of Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, Ghada Abdulfattah loved to swim at her local pool. Now, she is tentatively returning to the water.
Ghada Abdulfattah The once-turquoise water of a swimming pool in Deir Al Balah has turned cloudy and opaque, with the pool floor no longer visible, Aug. 31. 2026. Play Pause Share Shared content is always free to recipients. Copy link Copied! Font Size Share this story Copy Link Link copied
Everyone was complaining about the murky water in the pool. Once turquoise, it had turned opaque with dirt, making it impossible to see the floor. Dead insects bobbed along the surface. I hovered at the edge, reluctant to dip my body in.
But then a thought pushed through my hesitation: I’ve been waiting for this for so long.
Last October, a fragile ceasefire took hold here in Gaza. But that didn’t mean we could simply restart the lives we had before the war. So much of what used to make up an ordinary life here was reduced to rubble: cafés, gyms, restaurants, hotels, strawberry farms, horseback-riding parks, chalets. All these small, unremarkable places, where we didn’t think twice about spending an afternoon, had either been demolished or unreachable, sealed off in the far north or far south of Gaza. They were no longer safe places to travel.
Three years after Israel’s invasion, Gazans are tentatively building a new normal in the rubble of their old lives. For our correspondent, that means returning to her beloved swim lessons.
For months, I searched for somewhere I could return to my small, unremarkable prewar hobby, swimming, somewhere I could again feel something as ordinary as water on my skin. When I finally found an ad on social media for this pool, I stared at it for a long time. The form asked for my name, ID, and phone number, and I was afraid. The Israeli government is said to collect information from decoy social media ads. In Gaza, we have learned to always move carefully. But eventually, I called the organizers. And after weeks of waiting, I got a text message: The first class was about to begin.
So now that I was finally there, in Gaza’s only functioning swimming pool, I wasn’t about to turn back just because the owners couldn’t afford to pay $1,000 to filter and treat the water, or $700 to refill it. Clean water is a luxury now. Nothing costs what it used to.
I remember the light of that evening, the particular gold of it spilling over the horizon. I was introduced to the coach and the other women, my fellow swimmers. There was a kind of shy excitement among us, the kind you feel when you’re doing something you haven’t let yourself do in a long time.
I found myself feeling hesitant, not about the water, but about something smaller and stranger: Would I be able to enjoy swimming again? Would I be able to just relax?
The coach kept telling me, “You’re stressed.” I agreed. We all did. But is stressed even the right term for what people in Gaza are living through now? Stressed is a word for people who have deadlines, or difficult bosses, or too much to do in too little time.
Ghada Abdulfattah A man walks through a displacement camp at Gaza City's main port, where tents and makeshift shelters stretch toward the sea, Sept. 27, 2026. It doesn’t capture three years of war, deprivation, disappointment, famine, nonstop displacements, nonstop bombing, and, above all, ongoing uncertainty – the kind that doesn’t let you plan a single day ahead, let alone a life. So yes, we are stressed. All day, all night, all the time. This is Gaza.
And yet there we were, a group of women, trying to swim anyway, trying to hold our bodies in that loose, unafraid way that allows you to float, when almost nothing in our lives was loose or unafraid.
There should be a name for the particular kind of moment I lived that day – when you do something again for the first time after it has been taken away.
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The first time I ate an egg again, as food started coming back in, felt luxurious. I recall my 3-year-old niece ate a banana without peeling it. She had simply forgotten, or maybe never fully learned, what to do with the fruit because by the time she was old enough to learn, there weren’t any bananas left to practice on.
Fortunately, when I go to the pool, I still have my navy blue burkini. We found it under the rubble, one of my few possessions that wasn’t damaged by Israeli bombs. My goggles and swimming cap miraculously survived, too. My fellow swimmers often ask me where I got it – they are searching themselves. I feel almost apologetic telling them my gear is from before the war, when sports stores were still stocked. But this is life in Gaza now. Not one life, but two – a prewar one and a postwar one – and every so often, they touch.
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