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Gaza City, Gaza Strip In a small corner inside Taqat Gaza’s co-working space, Saja al-Ghoul has been working on his latest mobile app concept.
The 23-year-old programmer, like colleagues from the space, is focused on developing programs that can help overcome some of the challenges of living in Palestine.
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Identifying a problem is not difficult; two years of Israel civil war in Gazaand a cease-fire that has not stopped the attack, or allowed for proper reconstruction to take place, means that the area is full of problems.
Saja’s program is called “Waselni” – Arabic for “help me reach my destination”. They want to help alleviate the transportation problems faced by the Palestinians in Gaza.
The app allows people to share rides and coordinate trips to save money travel expenseswhich has increased significantly in recent months. You also include a prepaid electronic wallet to avoid the ever-increasing financial burden of war.
“Anyone can make a trip, for example, from al-Shifa area to Saraya in the middle of Gaza City at 8am, and then other people can join the ride and share the cost,” said Saja.
Rare goods
Bahaa al-Mallahi, a 26-year-old information graduate, was in the same situation as Saja. His program idea focuses on another common problem in war: the loss of assets.
“People lost almost everything migration,” Bahaa said.
Bahaa noted that recovering lost items has become increasingly difficult, and that requests regarding missing items have flooded social media.
He came up with the idea of creating a dedicated digital platform for lost and found items, which he named “Rajja’li” – Arabic for “return it to me”.
“If you find something, you put it on the platform. If you lose something, you search for it there,” Bahaa explained.
But the work did not end there. Bahaa also began to think about creating a platform in the future to include cases of children who have gone missing during displacement or crowding – a phenomenon that is very common in Gaza.
“Every day we see reports of missing children,” Bahaa said. “Because of the life in the tents and the lack of communication, finding the children and reuniting them with their families is difficult.”
“If a child is missing in a certain area, an immediate notification can be sent to nearby users with a picture and description of the child,” he said.
Obstacles
For both Saja and Bahaa, creating the app is half the journey. Both have faced many challenges, some related to the challenges faced by programmers, and others related to Gaza and the war.
The Saja program, for example, needs to be widely adopted to be effective. If someone opens the app and finds that there are a few people who want to travel the same route at the same time, then they will not try to use it again. Saja agreed that they need to be bought and promoted by local governments to help spread the word and convince drivers.
Meanwhile, Bahaa said he needs cooperation from government agencies if he wants people to trust his platform to find the missing documents.
Obstacles go beyond being seen and taken. The cost of developing apps has been a burden for young developers in Gaza, especially since many new projects rely on smart payment devices.
“We need AI subscriptions, and this is very expensive,” Bahaa said. Even the most important services have been paid for, and prices are still rising.
Bahaa once worked as an engineer at an internet company, but was laid off when the war broke out. He later tried to get remote access to companies outside of Gaza, but says it was impossible.
Due to the economic crisis, Bahaa says many talented young people are now trapped by unemployment, constant power outages, internet outages, and high cost of labor.
“These days, internet and electricity have become luxuries,” he said.
He also pointed to the low cost and tediousness of the co-working environment that developers rely on so much.
“You pay hundreds of shekels a month to have a place with electricity and internet,” he said.
Knowledge gap
For engineer Sharif Naeem, the founder and head of the Taqat Gaza work center, the project was not an ordinary project but a direct response to the collapse of Gaza’s technological sector after the war.
“Taqat was a response to the real problem that remote workers in Gaza are facing: the lack of a safe place with electricity and internet,” Naeem told Al Jazeera.
At the beginning of the war, thousands of freelancers and programmers lost their jobs due to damage and power lines were cut for long periods of time. Many lost their jobs or international contracts, while others were unable to use their devices or attend online meetings.
“Our first goal was simple: how do we get people back to work?” Naeem said.
He established Taqat Gaza as a small cooperative for remote workers before gradually expanding during the war to several areas across Gaza, including Nuseirat and Deir el-Balah.
Later, after people returned to northern Gaza in early 2025, the organization opened its headquarters in Gaza City, which houses about 250 freelancers and programmers.
But after a while, those behind Taqat Gaza realized that the problem was no longer about electricity or the workplace. The main issue was the huge technological knowledge gap, caused by the war that separated Gaza’s developers from the fast-growing technological world of the world.
“We realized that the war created a huge knowledge gap,” Naeem said. “The world of technology has come a long way in the last two years while the youth in Gaza were busy trying to survive.”
He said that many software developers who have returned to work have found themselves lagging behind in the global market in terms of skills, tools, and technologies, especially due to the increasing use of artificial intelligence.
“We began to focus on training programs that bridge the gap between the market needs and the potential among the youth here,” he said.
As a result, Taqat has evolved from a workplace to a training and incubation center for young developers and programmers through several programs established in partnership with universities and local and international organizations.
Within these programs, many practical ideas and technical projects began to appear, all trying to solve everyday problems in Gaza, from transportation problems to documents lost during migration.
Naeem says that many of these ideas did not come out of themselves, but directly from the life experiences of the young people themselves.
“Young people here are not creating fantasy projects,” he said. “They are developing solutions to the problems they face every day.”
However, the upcoming career path is still challenging. Along with weak electricity and internet infrastructure, manufacturers are facing major economic and technical challenges, from rising costs of equipment and software registrations to difficulties accessing international markets.
Despite this, Naeem believes that Gaza’s tech sector still has a chance to recover if it is given the right space and the right support.
He said: “We have a lot of things that people can do. The problem is not a lack of talent, but a lack of real money in that talent.”
