On a stretch of Gaza City beach, three young men laid their surfboards on the sand and stretched their limbs, preparing to paddle out past the sewage-fouled shallows. A few children splashed nearby, while beyond the breakers, the surfers fought the crashing waves for a moment of weightlessness. “When you catch a wave, ride it, glide along it, that feeling can’t be put into words,” said 23-year-old Tahseen Abu Assi, who learned the sport from his father and grandfather. He and his friends are the remnants of a 17-strong surfing team that existed before the war; now, they are just three, clinging to battered boards nearly two decades old.

The sea has become the only outlet for nearly all of Gaza’s two million people, displaced by a war that began in October 2023 and has left them crammed into a narrow coastal strip of tents and damaged buildings. With daytime temperatures already reaching 34.5°C and the number of extremely hot days expected to climb, the makeshift shelters have turned into “an oven”, as Nahed Hamouda, a 56-year-old father of four from Jabalia, described it while fanning himself with a piece of cardboard. Fresh water is scarce, so families flock to the shore not for leisure but to bathe and wash clothes, even though the water is thick with untreated sewage and waste. “The seawater is not clean. There’s sewage in it, filled with dirt,” said Shehab al-Suwaireki, a father of six. “But we go in and wash and bathe then we get out. In any case, germs are getting to our bodies.”

This daily ritual unfolds against a backdrop of collapsed infrastructure. Israeli bombardment has knocked out water pumps, sewage stations, and treatment plants, according to Gaza municipality spokesperson Husni Muhanna. A report by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in June 2026 warned that 170,000 households—roughly one million people—still live in tents, while another 5,000 households sleep outdoors and 52,000 are packed into overcrowded shelters. Some 850,000 people lack even basic emergency items such as plastic sheeting, plywood, and rope. The NRC’s Shelter Cluster coordinator, Jehan Salim, noted that simple measures like shading and ventilation could significantly reduce risks, but such materials are “deliberately not being allowed to enter”. Jan Egeland, the NRC’s secretary general, called it “an outrage that families in Gaza, after months of displacement and loss, now face summer heat in makeshift tents because Israel continues to restrict shelter materials.”

For the surfers, the sea offers a different kind of escape—a fleeting sense of safety and breath amid the instability. “Even with the war, the shelling, and the destruction, we’re still continuing with this sport, because it lets us breathe and makes us feel safe,” Abu Assi said. Yet the violence reaches the water, too: in mid-May, fishermen were injured by Israeli naval gunfire near the southern coast, and days later three more were wounded off Gaza City. The surfers face a more mundane but persistent obstacle: the absence of basic equipment. Surf wax is unavailable, so they rub candle wax onto their boards. Abdel Rahim Al-Ustadh, 19, clutched a battered red-and-blue board and explained, “We treat these boards like great treasures to us, because losing any board or having it confiscated threatens our ability to continue in this sport.”

Khalil Abu Jiyab, 18, who has surfed for 13 years, said his hopes had “almost been shattered”, but he still dreams of competing outside the Strip. For now, the sea remains the one thing to look forward to. “The only outlet in Gaza is the sea,” he said. “Without it, life would have vanished long ago.” On that same shoreline, Wadie al-Ras, a 36-year-old displaced man, stood and echoed the thought: “The only outlet in the Gaza Strip, from north to south, is the sea. The tents we have been staying in since the war are a torment.” Between the surfers waxing their boards with candle stubs and the families scrubbing clothes in sewage-tinged waves, the Mediterranean has become a shared, precarious lifeline—a place where the desperate search for relief meets the inescapable realities of a shattered territory.