GAZA CITY – When Wasfi al-Garosha returned to prison in Gaza City just after sunrise one September morning, his daughter was not crying and his brother was still asleep.
Mr. al-Garosha, a 29-year-old plasterer, made his way back to prison while his niece and nephew were preparing their bags for school. His wife and mother made tea. And his father – unemployed like almost half of the Gaza Strip – was just waking up.
This was the 17th, or possibly his 18th, arrest of Mr. al-Garosha since early 2020. He had stopped counting and Gaza authorities do not have accurate records. Mr al-Garosha took out a loan in 2019 to pay for his wedding and now has to stay in police jail on a regular basis because, like his father and brother, he is unemployed and cannot repay the debt.
“It has become normal by now,” said Mr. al-Garosha as he stepped out of his apartment. “A completely normal part of my life.”
And so it is for many in Gaza City.
Debt – and wedding debt in particular – has become a symbol of the economic crisis. In the first nine months of 2021 alone, the Gaza City police issued 448 arrest warrants against indebted grooms – more than the cumulative total of 2017, 2018 and 2019 in the city. The figures for 2020 were not available.
Since Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel and Egypt have increased pressure on the militant group by enforcing a blockade on the strip. This has damaged Gaza’s economy and is a major contributor to an unemployment rate of over 40 percent. One consequence of this for young Gazans is that they often cannot afford a wedding ceremony.
But for many, a big wedding is an important rite of passage. Unwilling to delay marriage – the only accepted route to sexual intimacy in a conservative society – young men take out wedding loans, often worth about $ 2,000, or nearly the average annual salary in Gaza.
If, like Mr al-Garosha, they fail to repay, they usually end up in jail, the result of a 2015 law that made it even harder for them to pay off their debts.
When he returned to prison on September morning, Mr. al-Garosha stepped on his landing and was still holding his one-year-old daughter Dina. She was born after he started his cycle of prison sentences, and he was just a stop-start presence in her life. Mr al-Garosha gave Dina one last kiss before handing her back to his 20 year old wife Samar.
When he reached the street, he sat down with brisk steps. He walked past the tire shop opening his shop, past the empty space where a missile struck during a brief war in May of last year, past a row of scuffling schoolchildren waiting to buy snacks from a food stand.
At a similar street stall, Mr. al-Garosha met Samar for the first time one afternoon in 2017. Mr. al-Garosha ran the booth with a friend selling tea and coffee. One day the friend’s sister showed up and Mr. al-Garosha had a brief chat with her. It was Samar, then 16.
They only spoke for a few minutes and he was unable to financially support a spouse. But Mr. al-Garosha felt a connection and, perhaps more importantly, that he was running out of time to get married.
Many Gazans get married in their late teens, and he was already 25. Since most marriages in Gaza are still arranged through the parents of a bride, he called Samar’s father to ask permission to marry her. They got engaged four days later.
After passing the fighting children, Mr. al-Garosha quickened his pace. The prison guards expected him before 8 a.m.
To his left was a shuttered cinema – deserted, like almost all cinemas in Gaza since the late 1980s, when the combination of a Palestinian uprising and growing Islamist extremism forced cinema owners to close their shops.
To his right was a wall covered with paintings from the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Like most Gazans, Mr. al-Garosha, who has been stuck in Gaza since the beginning of the blockade, had never seen the mosque in person.
A single Israeli shekel – legal tender in Gaza – lay in the dirt outside a school, not far from a dead cat. He bent down to pocket the coin, worth a little over a quarter US, half smiling, half shrugging. Only 5,569 shekels left to pay off his debts.
Mr. al-Garosha first got into debt when he and Samar were engaged. Like most grooms in Gaza, he had to pay the bride’s parents a bride price, in his case about $ 3,500. To raise the money, he sold his phone, laptop and furniture – as well as his drinks cart – and robbed himself of a source of income.
Then 17 months later came the cost of the wedding. As poor as he was, Mr. al-Garosha did not want to miss the rare opportunity to prove his social standing to his friends and family. So he rented a wedding hall for 70 guests, a motorcade, an outdoor stage and several loudspeakers – and bought the furniture for his new marriage bedroom.
That totaled 7,500 shekels, or about $ 2,375. To pay for that, he took out a loan from Accord, a company that was originally founded to fund wedding expenses but is now focused on more profitable markets.
“There are so many caregivers who are losing their jobs,” said Accord owner Louay Ahmed. “There is a higher risk of lending money.”
For four months, Mr. al-Garosha managed to make his monthly repayments by relying on irregular plastering jobs. However, he fell behind in the summer of 2019, which resulted in the credit company launching legal proceedings. In October 2019, just five months after Dina was born, he began the first of six three-week prison sentences, an ongoing cycle of freedom and incarceration. He faces further jail sentences if the debt is not paid back.
Each three-week semester is usually divided into three parts: He is allowed to return home on most weekends.
As he approached the prison that September morning, Mr. al-Garosha was walking past a memorial commemorating a Hamas attack on Israeli soldiers – a giant fist pierces a replica of an Israeli armored vehicle. Then he went under a huge banner in honor of Hamas.
When he saw the banner, Mr. al-Garosha shook his head. He respected Hamas’ military campaigns against Israel, he said, but their demeanor angered him. In his opinion, the group provides its members with money, jobs and social support so that people like him are financially on their own.
He trudged up Omar Mukhtar Street, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, past several clothing stores that had yet to open for the day.
Given the choice, Samar al-Garosha said she would work in a business like this – to help her husband pay off the debt. But Mr. al-Garosha refuses to let her. He considers it dishonorable that his wife should work with men.
When Mr. al-Garosha spotted a street vendor, he stopped to buy two cigarettes for one shekel each using a five-shekel coin his mother had given him. What were two shekels, he said, when he owed thousands?
He turned into a side street. The detention center was in sight and another prison term was about to begin. Inside, a cramped cell awaited him, often manned by 40 men, usually charged with petty crimes.
Fatherhood made it worthwhile, he said. No marriage would have meant no Dina – and he felt it was important to raise children while he was young himself.
Though he was still half an hour early, he walked in briskly without bothering to enjoy his last moments of freedom.
He nodded to the guards at the gate, whose faces were now almost as familiar to him as his daughter’s.
Mr. al-Garosha admitted that sometimes in prison he forgets what Dina looks like.
