Gaza City – It’s a small space, covered with a worn-out metal sheet roof and tarpaulins. Mohammed al-Jadba is working on the walls, using stones from the rubble of his destroyed house and mud to fill the gaps.It almost looks like a home, but isn’t quite one yet.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listMohammed’s old home – in Gaza City’s Tuffah neighbourhood – was once a four-storey building. But Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has left it, and the area around it, resembling the aftermath of an earthquake.The 31-year-old has been living with his family of 10 in tents beside the rubble of their old home since the October ceasefire.After a rainy winter that left his family wet and cold, he has decided to use what he can to build a more permanent shelter. In the absence of construction materials, such as cement, because of Israeli restrictions on imports into Gaza, he is forced to use mud and whatever he can salvage from his old home.“I said I want to make a place … a small space, a room and a bathroom, that’s it,” Mohammed tells Al Jazeera, adding that the experiment has quickly grown into something much bigger than he had imagined.“I built one room, I liked it … so I said, I’ll build another … then a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom … I thought, ‘Oh God, what have I gotten myself into?’”Mohammed has been working on the small house for four months. He describes collecting iron, window frames, and door frames from his old house.The mud sticks everything together – bu …
