In Gaza, actors perform a war they are still living

Sheikh Radwan, Gaza – Before Abu Qasai Qaddoura can begin acting, he has to find something to burn.

At six in the morning, the 42-year-old walks to a stall in Sheikh Radwan, where his family has been displaced, to buy firewood. It costs seven shekels ($2) per kilogram. When he cannot afford it, he scavenges for something else to burn – cardboard, plastic or pieces of wood salvaged from destroyed homes.

He lights a small fire so his family can keep warm and cook a meal. He then washes the black soot from his hands before leaving his home for rehearsal.

The journey takes two hours on foot. Qaddoura avoids a main road clogged with rubble and where he says Israeli gunfire poses a danger, taking side streets instead.

By the time he reaches the rehearsal space – a makeshift fabric-and-plastic tent pitched in the car park of Gaza City’s Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Centre, his knees hurt and he struggles to catch his breath.

“I arrive at the rehearsal. I’m exhausted but immediately get to work because we don’t even have time for a short break,” he says.

Weary and quiet, Qaddoura sits slumped as he speaks, his hands resting heavily on his knees. On stage, he plays a doctor trapped inside a Gaza hospital. The baby doll cradled in his arms is his character’s son. There is no anesthetic. He must amputate the child’s leg himself. The baby dies.

Abu Qasai Qaddoura takes the stage as a doctor trapped inside a Gaza hospital in 50 Minutes in Gaza [File: Youssef Fares/Al Jazeera]

The scene is based on the real-life experience of a father in Gaza, whose video the actors have watched.

Until now, Qaddoura had never acted. Before the war, he worked behind the camera as a production manager and sound technician for local media companies. Israeli airstrikes in northern Gaza destroyed his home in al-Tawam.

Now he and his wife, along with their children – Ghazal, 15, Qusai, 12, and Sham, seven – live in a single room on the rooftop of a rented house, sheltered by a plastic tarp.

When he holds the child during rehearsal, the face he sees is not always the character’s son.

“I wasn’t just playing a character; I was staring at my own children’s faces,” Qaddoura says. “Every time I held that child on stage, terror gripped my heart that tomorrow this could be one of my own sons. I couldn’t stop the tears because the fear felt too real.”

On stage, Qaddoura does not break character. He keeps holding the boy until director Ali Abu Yasin calls for them to stop.

Then he collapses into sobs, and the rehearsal stops. For 15 minutes, Qaddoura sits quietly at the side of the stage, sipping water, uncertain whether he can perform it again.

“I remembered my own children, and how a father could stand helpless and broken before his child’s wound,” he says afterward.

Eventually Ali Abu Yasin, the play’s director, calls the actors back. Qaddoura gets on his feet, takes his place and does it all again.

Building a theatre

This is what Abu Yasin has asked his actors to do: take experiences they are already struggling to survive and turn them into theatre.

Abu Yasin speaks calmly and deliberately, even amid the chaos surrounding the production. He has spent 37 years as an actor, playwright and director, training generations of performers in Gaza. His productions have travelled beyond the enclave to countries including Egypt and Tunisia, where he won a best actor award at the Tunis International Theatre Festival.

But the theatrical landscape he built his career 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 City was damaged in Israeli attacks in 2023. By March 2026, UNESCO had verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza since October 7, 2023, including 128 buildings of historical or artistic interest.

For Abu Yasin, the problem was now immediate: Where do you produce theatre when you no longer have a theatre?

His play 50 Minutes in Gaza began in April 2026 as a theatrical writing workshop supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Fourteen young men and women were supposed to participate. As the war continued, some were wounded and left Gaza for treatment; others were displaced or unable to make the journey.

Eight eventually made it into the production.

They had originally joined to learn the craft of writing for the stage. But once the script was finished, the participants decided to perform it themselves.

The foundation covered basic production costs and gave the performers a small honorarium for their work, rather than a salary. Qaddoura says his family otherwise survives largely on humanitarian aid. Abu Yasin insists money wasn’t what kept the actors making dangerous, exhausting journeys to rehearsals.

Instead, he says, the work became a form of psychological and emotional release: a way for the actors to process what they were living through and ultimately, to offer a similar outlet to audiences enduring the war around them.

“We are ordinary humans, running after clean water, electricity, food trucks and a livelihood so we can survive amidst skyrocketing prices,” Abu Yasin says.

“But when we step onto the theatre stage, we feel more alive.”

Actors perform a scene from 50 Minutes in Gaza, a play shaped by their experiences of war, siege and displacement [File: Youssef Fares/Al Jazeera]

At first, there was no stage.

The actors squeezed into fabric tents pitched directly on hot asphalt in the car park of the Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Centre, where the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate had established its tent and site.

Displaced families lived on the other side of the canvas. The air smelled of sweat, dust and burning plastic. Arguments and traffic drifted inside. Above them was the persistent buzz of Israeli reconnaissance drones.

After 12 days, amid gunfire in the area, the company moved again.

This time they rehearsed inside a small partitioned room in Ajwa cafe, a partially damaged building in central Gaza City.

There was no ventilation. Electricity was unreliable. Music was played from a mobile phone.

And there was almost nothing from which to build a set.

With timber scarce and increasingly valuable as firewood, the actors gathered pieces of wood and damaged tent canvas. With the help of a displaced craftsman, they built the set themselves.

“When you ask me about difficulties, it seems the better question is: What was available or normal?” Abu Yasin says.

“The difficulty was in everything; the work literally emerged from under the rubble, its set came from tents, and the actors were still dusting gunpowder off their bodies.”

Some actors, like Qaddoura, walked for hours through destroyed streets to reach him, arriving with rubble dust on their clothes.

Then they began pretending to be people trapped by war.

Learning the sounds of the sky

One day in May, actress Iman Ouda was rehearsing a scene where she plays a pregnant woman named Haneen. Her character has tried to conceive for nine years, and now she is trapped inside a hospital, giving birth under siege.

In the middle of the scene, an explosion struck nearby, hitting a building and blowing dust into the rehearsal space. The actors covered their mouths and noses and rushed outside. Then, almost as one, they reached for their phones.

“When the place shakes from a nearby bombing, we stop immediately,” Qaddoura says.

“I rush to my phone to call my family, and due to weak network coverage, I live through minutes of true terror.”

Only after they confirmed their families were safe did they return inside to continue rehearsals.

At 25, Ouda has been acting for six years. Calm and expressive in conversation, she sits upright as she speaks, punctuating her words with gentle, focused gestures. War has taught her another skill: distinguishing the sounds above her.

When Apache helicopters or reconnaissance drones drew closer, she says, the actors often kept rehearsing. Their eyes would briefly gaze towards the sky or meet across the room.

“The connection between my real self and the role is fear,” she says. “Would I finish the show and return home, or what would happen? I became a person who fears everything, loss and joy alike.”

Sometimes, it took only a name to bring that fear and loss rushing back.

When Abu Yasin introduced a character called Missing Youssef, Ouda began to cry. Her own father was named Youssef. He had been killed during the war. Later, Israeli forces bulldozed the cemetery where he had been buried; his family could no longer locate his grave.

For Tamer Najm, the line between performance and reality is thin: His role in 50 Minutes in Gaza echoes his own experience of displacement and fatherhood during the war [File: Youssef Fares/Al Jazeera]

For Tamer Najm, another actor, the resemblance between life and script came through fatherhood.

Najm, 35, plays Khaled, a man who has spent years trying to have a child with his wife, only to find himself trapped in a hospital during their final IVF attempt.

Before the war, Najm had saved for years to buy an apartment in Gaza City’s Nasser neighbourhood. The apartment was destroyed.

He and his pregnant wife moved between friends’ homes, his in-laws, sidewalks and tents. Their second child was born during the war.

“I was not acting the character of ‘Khaled’; I was living him,” Najm says.

“I had actually been displaced with my pregnant wife from the north amidst fire and danger, terrified every moment that she might lose her baby.”

Every time Najm left for rehearsal, his wife worried about whether he would return. Before leaving, he would tell her: “If you hear a nearby bombing, don’t go outside; take care of yourself and the baby.”

Then he would walk out to play a man afraid of losing his family. “We left with our hands on our hearts, knowing that stepping out in Gaza means returning either safely or in a shroud.”

Yet for Najm, staying home was not necessarily the safer choice emotionally. After losing his home and being repeatedly displaced with his pregnant wife, he saw performing as a way to resist despair and process what he had lived through. Theatre, he felt, allowed him not only to confront but to document his own trauma – and to carry something of Gaza’s experience beyond the places where they were living it.

Opening night

Eventually, Abu Yasin found them a stage.

The A.M. Qattan Foundation offered its cultural centre on Al-Wehda Street in Gaza City. The centre had been closed and unavailable during the early stages of the project because of the security situation, severe power outages and damage in the surrounding area.

In any case, Abu Yasin says, the project had begun simply as a writing workshop: The company only approached formal cultural venues once the script was complete, the actors had been cast and the work was ready to move onto a stage.

Several of the actors had performed there before the war. After months of tents, asphalt and cramped rooms, they were back inside a theatre.

Just days before opening night on July 19, an Israeli missile struck nearby during rehearsal. The building shook, while scraps of debris fell from the ceiling. Then came the screams from outside.

Five people were killed nearby, Gaza medics reported to local press.

On July 19, they prepared for their first audience.

By 4:30pm, people were filling the roughly 150-seat auditorium. Admission was free.

Behind the curtain, Ouda was trembling. “I was so afraid the electricity would cut out, or that a nearby bombardment would happen and force us to stop the play mid-performance.”

There were no elaborate costumes. They wore everyday clothes gathered from displacement tents and applied what make-up they had in cracked mirrors and by the light of their phones.

At 5pm, the lights went down.

Director Ali Abu Yasin addresses the audience after 50 Minutes in Gaza, a play he says emerged ‘from under the rubble of the war’ [File: Youssef Fares/Al Jazeera]

Qaddoura stepped onto the stage and became the doctor who could not save his son. Ouda became Haneen, giving birth under siege. Najm became Khaled, trying to protect the family he had waited years to have.

For 50 minutes, the actors performed versions of lives they had carried with them into the theatre.

Among those watching was Najm’s five-year-old daughter, his elder child. His second child, the baby his wife had been carrying during their displacement, had been born during the war.

She cried when she saw her father onstage, covered in dust and dressed in torn clothes. Afterward, she took one of the prop dolls into her arms.

“Dad, I cried when I saw you crying on stage because you looked just like you do at home when you get stressed or worry about us.”

His wife told him: “I didn’t feel like I was watching an actor; I was watching you and our real struggles at home. It felt as though you opened the front door of our house to the entire audience.”

The play went on tour through Gaza in late July through to August, with performances in Daraj, Deir el-Balah, Nuseirat and Khan Younis. At a wedding hall in Khan Younis, the company says more than 500 people attended.

“This performance was a message to the occupation that destroyed all of Gaza’s theatres: Theatre cannot be destroyed,” he says.

“It requires theatre makers, writers and directors, and even if the halls are destroyed, we can perform in the street.”

As the cotton-sheet curtain falls and the stage lights go dark, Qaddoura’s 50 minutes are over.

He gathers his family and begins the journey home. His seven-year-old daughter Sham has fallen asleep, so he carries her.

Outside, the streets are dark. The family uses their mobile phones to light the way as distant shelling sounds across Gaza.

When they reach the rooftop room where they are staying, Qaddoura puts Sham down. The other children are still waiting to eat.

So he returns to the task that began his day. Qaddoura lights a fire. Then he and his wife begin cooking dinner.