Sami Hawadeer, a Gaza policeman, owes his job to his brother, Ahmed. Not that Ahmed put a good word in with his boss or anything like that but, by getting killed in 2006, Ahmed left a vacancy on the force and Mr. Hawadeer, now 36, was allowed to fill it.
Thanks to that arrangement, Mr. Hawadeer, who is married with one child, earns 2,000 shekels a month, or about $685. (In case you're wondering, everyone in Gaza, including Hamas that controls the Gaza Strip, still pays its salaries and counts its money in Israeli shekels.)
However, since Hamas is strapped for cash, Mr. Hawadeer takes home only the equivalent of about $100 a month. He is owed the rest and hopes that some day he can collect it.
Take a Google Earth tour of the Gaza Strip
One year after a devastating 51-day war between Israel and militants in Gaza that killed more 2,200 people and destroyed or damaged a quarter of the houses in Gaza, this is a glimpse at the reality of life among the ruins.
While no one here is dying of starvation – thanks to United Nations-supplied food aid – the territory that is home to 1.8 million people is nowhere close to being back to normal. Some 250,000 people continue to live in UN schools and makeshift shelters. A majority of people who want to work are unemployed and far more Gazans live below the poverty line than above it.
Mr. Hawadeer and his wife consider themselves fortunate. Though this neighbourhood of Beit Hanoun in the northeast corner of Gaza was heavily shelled, the four-room concrete home they share with Ms. Hawadeer's mother and two brothers was not damaged during last summer's war and none of the family was injured.
Although imported cement and cinder blocks are available for rebuilding Gaza’s bombed out homes and stores, most Gazans can’t afford to buy them.
Heidi Levine/for The Globe and Mail
It is common in Gaza today that families double up in their homes either because a house owned by one part of the family is damaged or simply to save money.
This family also is lucky that Ms. Hawadeer's mother, Inat Abu Harbid, 55, has a modest income too. Because her oldest son was killed in 2000 at the start of the second intifada, she receives about about $340 a month from the Palestinian Authority (PA) of president Mahmoud Abbas.
As with Hamas's martyred policemen, in this macabre way, death breathes new life into Gaza's survivors.
The PA, which rules the Palestinian West Bank and is nominally in charge in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip, also continues to pay the salary of some 70,000 PA employees who live in Gaza, even though many are no longer on the job.
Most of those PA workers receive about $860 a month, an income that Gaza economist Omar Shaban says amounts to the poverty line for the average Gaza family of six. Collectively, those monthly stipends provide the biggest financial boost to the Gaza Strip.
Altogether, the Hawadeer-Abu Harbid household brings in just over half that amount. Ms. Abu Harbid's husband married another woman and moved away, and her two sons, aged 22 and 17, have never worked.
But as descendants of refugees from what is now Israel (their ancestors lived near Beersheva until 1948), they are entitled to UN assistance. Once a month, the family's number is called and the young Abu Harbid men go down to the UN warehouse and line up to receive their staples.
At the gates of Gaza
2:13
They have no car, so they load a wagon with their allotment of cooking oil, flour, sugar and rice as well as some tinned food such as tuna and chickpeas. Their story is typical of families throughout Gaza.
The main room of their home has no furnishings, just a few thin mattresses against one wall and some cushions for sitting. There's no television in the house, no computer, no telephone other than Mr. Hawadeer's cellphone.
A tank of propane for their two-burner stove and oven costs $24 and lasts about 20 days. Water safe enough for cooking, drinking and bathing is supplied privately, by truck, from a desalination plant and costs the family $3.45 for 250 litres.
The Alewa family in nearby Shejaia is not so fortunate. They fled heavy shelling during last year's war (having been warned in advance by Israel) but returned to find their home gone.
"We couldn't even tell where the road used to be," said Moussa Alewa, who sits most of the time in the "courtyard" he has marked off with sheets of scrap corrugated metal and old mattresses.
"I intend to rebuild my home more beautiful than before," he said.
The family was lucky enough to be provided with a UN trailer in which they can sleep. They bathe and cook in an area between the trailer and "courtyard" covered by a plastic tarpaulin.
They share a large water tank with neighbours and hoses run from it in several directions.
Gaza families in general eat a lot of locally grown vegetables and fruit – tomatoes cost 34 cents a kilo; potatoes, 52 cents; nectarines, $1.03; and grapes, a treat, $1.72 a kilo.
Eggs, a major source of protein, cost $3.45 for a carton of 30.
Chicken costs between $5 and $7 a kilo, while red meat, at $17.25 a kilo, is a real luxury.
Israel has allowed extensive imports of food into Gaza since early this year or prices would be a lot higher.
Even so, butcher Ibrahim al-Laham said he's lucky if he has eight or 10 customers in a day in his Khan Yunis shop. "People who used to buy meat every second day, now buy it just once a week or once every two weeks," he said. A lot of his customers, he added, come in just to buy bones with which to make soup.
A grocery store owner in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah shrugs when you ask her how business is these days. "People always need food, of course," she said, "but they can't always pay for it." She opened an account book that showed page after page of customers and the amounts they owe.
"At the start of every month [when the PA paycheques are cashed], business is very good," she said. "People come in and pay off a little of what they owe."
"But after 10 or 15 days, everything's on credit again."
The woman, who declined to give her name for reasons of modesty in her conservative community, estimated that she and her husband clear only about $690 a month. Fortunately for them, they get their own food at cost.
In Rafah, at the southern end of Gaza, wedding-store owner Issam Mahmoud, a former professional soccer player, laments the consequences of the third war with Israel in five years. His posh store was destroyed when Israeli shelling levelled Rafah's new mall.
"My stock was completely ruined," he said.
Read Patrick Martin's At the gates of Gaza: Two vantage points of the Israeli-Palestinian divide
For several years, Rafah had been Gaza's boom town, as people grew rich from building or operating tunnels under the border with Egypt and bringing in badly needed supplies to the residents and businesses in the territory. Last summer's war, however, led to the destruction of the hundreds of commercial tunnels – either Israel or Egypt blew them up – and money here has dried up too.
Mr. Mahmoud said he still supplies about 100 weddings a month. However, they are done on a smaller scale and most people use what they call "wedding projects" whereby someone funds the wedding then collects the money – plus administration charges (interest is illegal) – over several months or years.
Rafah's tunnels may be closed, but many needed goods are coming into Gaza from Israel through the nearby crossing at Kerem Shalom in the southeast corner of the territory. Between 300 and 500 trucks pass through here every day except Friday and Saturday carrying building materials – especially cement – and giant bales of hay for livestock and food. Much of the material is earmarked for use by a massive rebuilding program funded by Qatar that only now is turning out new homes.
Bags of imported Israeli cement are now on sale everywhere in Gaza, as are cinder blocks made in the territory using Israeli cement, but few individuals can afford to buy enough of these things to rebuild a destroyed home.
Efforts to restart the economy are foundering for lack of electricity. Most parts of Gaza receive only about six hours of power a day, with some areas finding service very erratic.
"We ask our workers to come to work as soon as the power comes on in the morning," said Kamal Yazuri, owner of a small plant in east Gaza that bottles soft drinks. "When it goes off, they have to go home."
Gaza requires about 450 megawatts of power to meet its daily needs, says Mr. Shaban, the economist. Its diesel-powered generators can provide between 70 and 80 MW, while Israel supplies Gaza with 120 MW from its grid and Egypt supplies it with about 30 MW. Of the three sources, the Israeli is the most reliable, even during wars.
Few businesses or individuals can afford to run their own generators, though some entrepreneurs are setting up alternative grids from which customers can draw power. In Nuseirat Refugee Camp in central Gaza, for example, people pay a local consortium $40 a month to receive two amperes of power – enough to run lights, a TV set and a computer during blackouts.