Under a makeshift shelter—a parachute canopy from aid airdrops stretched over a wooden frame—Ahmed Abu Amsha gathers children for music lessons on the beach in Nuseirat camp, central Gaza.
The sounds of guitar, oud, and drums mix with the crash of waves. Displaced children, some barefoot, wearing torn clothes, their bodies thin and faces pale, are carefully adjusting the rhythm on a drum or the strings of a guitar.
Abu Amsha suddenly stops the ensemble, making sure some instruments are in tune and adjusting the percussion section of a song to make it easier for some of the struggling children. After about a month of training, he beams with pride at three-year-old Hayat, the youngest member of his group, as she gets a drum rhythm right. He repeats the exercise. The place pulses with life, love, peace, and smiles.
The journey here from Mawasi in southern Gaza was only about 12 kilometers, but it took hours. You have to wait at least an hour to find any vehicle, and with fuel prices fluctuating between $10 and $15 per liter, cars are extremely limited. I couldn’t find a seat and instead had to stand on the hitch between a car and the cart it was pulling, a new improvised transportation method that emerged during the war. The training space sits at the base of a small hill rising about eight meters.
There, Abu Amsha looks exhausted, but he’s clearly enjoying himself. Coffee brews over a fire, and he’s bought two cigarettes at about $1.50 each, relatively cheap compared to earlier in the war.
Abu Amsha, 42, is a professional musician, singer, and music teacher who worked as coordinator of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Gaza City before the war. Since October 7, 2023, he has been displaced multiple times across Gaza with his wife and five children, all of whom play instruments. His father, also a professional guitarist and English teacher, fled to Russia with 40 family members before the IDF occupied Rafah in May 2024. Abu Amsha’s two homes in Beit Hanoun, including a professional recording studio, were destroyed early in the war.
Despite losing everything, he has continued teaching music throughout the conflict, first in a camp for displaced artists in Rafah, then in Mawasi, and now in Nuseirat. He works with whatever instruments he can scavenge or repair with recycled materials, like guitar strings made from bicycle cables or flutes fashioned from plastic pipes.
He believes that staying alive is a daily victory, and making children smile amid what many experts, including some Israelis, describe as genocide, is its own form of resistance. We met in his beach tent as children’s voices rose and fell with their musical exercises.
Unlimited access to our
