Gaza voters prioritize jobs and security ahead of first elections in 20 years

Ahmad Mohsen, twenty-four years old, sells prepaid internet cards from a small shop in Deir el-Balah. Three years ago, before the war began, he held a nursing degree and was working toward his professional license. He imagined himself in a hospital, perhaps pursuing a master's degree or specialized training. The war erased that path. During the fighting's early months, he volunteered at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, moving between the wounded and the dead, until the absence of payment forced him to abandon the work. Now he sits behind a counter selling internet access, waiting for something better to arrive.

On November 28, Mohsen will cast his first vote in a Palestinian national election—the first in twenty years. He has thought carefully about what he wants from the candidates. Unemployment, security, housing, education, healthcare. These are not abstract policy positions. They are the shape of his life right now. "The first thing I want is to be able to find a stable job with a decent salary so I can support myself and my family, and the second thing is to have security," he said. Around him, eighty percent of Gaza's workforce is unemployed. The territory's economy has been destroyed by years of blockade and by a war that has killed more than seventy-four thousand Palestinians. His family owns land east of Salah al-Din Street, in a zone Israel has restricted. He cannot reach it. He is waiting for the October 2025 ceasefire agreement to hold, for Israeli forces to withdraw, for reconstruction to begin. But elections alone will not satisfy him. "A candidate should put themselves in the people's place and speak with the people's voice, not someone else's voice," he said. "They should speak for us, the young people who have been wronged for 20 years through wars and destruction."

Ghassan Marwan, fifty-three, remembers the 2006 elections differently. He was a goldsmith then, and he had built a factory that sustained his family. He voted at a school in Nuseirat for an independent candidate named Mustafa Barghouti. The experience felt clean to him—transparent, fair, almost celebratory in its democratic character. Twenty years later, he has lost both his home and his factory. In January 2024, during the war, they were destroyed. More than three decades of work could not protect what he had built. His children now live in tents. He carries water from distant sources, a task he never imagined he would face at this stage of his life. "After losing your home and your source of income, what else do you want?" he asked. "All you hope for is reconstruction, calm and security in the country."

Marwan believes the war has fundamentally altered how Palestinians relate to politics. "Our interest in politics has declined, not because it does not concern us, but because of all the frustration and despair that have accumulated," he said. People are consumed by the immediate: how to eat, how to survive the day. The prospect of elections leaves him suspended between hope and doubt. "Sometimes I feel that talking about elections is almost a joke, because there are no clear conditions for holding them," he said.

The Palestinian Central Elections Commission estimates that approximately 1.24 million Gazans are eligible to vote. The commission faces severe logistical obstacles. The territory has been devastated. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced. The commission's regional director, Jamil al-Khalidi, has prepared contingency plans to manufacture election materials locally in case Israel restricts their entry into Gaza. The vote will take place across the occupied West Bank, occupied East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

Iyad al-Qarra, a Gaza-based political analyst, argues that the war has not killed Palestinians' interest in politics but has transformed what they expect from it. After nearly three years of displacement, destruction, and lost work, voters are no longer asking for political administration or rhetoric. They are asking for leaders capable of restoring normal life. They want infrastructure rebuilt. They want health and education systems restored. They want the conditions that allow people to work and live again. "There is a widespread desire for leadership that puts Gaza's recovery at the top of its priorities, given the heavy price the Strip has paid," al-Qarra said. The election, in this reading, is not a referendum on ideology or party. It is a referendum on whether anyone can rebuild what the war has taken.