Gaza Herald — In Gaza, the sound of an approaching missile, an explosion in the distance or people suddenly screaming and running can mean the difference between life and death. But for thousands of deaf and hearing-impaired Palestinians, those warnings may never come.
They cannot hear the bombardment approaching. They may miss shouted evacuation instructions, emergency announcements or warnings spreading through crowded displacement camps. When everyone around them suddenly begins running, they may not even know why.
For Gaza’s deaf community, Israel’s war has therefore created another largely invisible struggle for survival: trying to understand danger in an environment where information can arrive only seconds before catastrophe.
Zuhdi Murtaja, a deaf Palestinian who works in a community kitchen serving children with hearing disabilities in Gaza City, put the dilemma simply in sign language: “How can we protect ourselves if we can’t hear the bombings or the warnings? And where is the safe place?”
There was no reassuring answer.
When Survival Depends on Watching Others
Fadl Kuraz, a sign-language interpreter and trainer who has worked with Gaza’s deaf community for more than three decades, tells deaf Palestinians to watch the people around them closely. If everyone suddenly starts running, they should run too.
He also advises them to carry cards identifying themselves as deaf and asking for assistance.
These are painfully basic survival mechanisms, but in Gaza they have become essential. Information that hearing Palestinians absorb almost automatically, explosions, conversations, announcements, warnings and rapidly spreading news, must reach deaf Palestinians through another person or visual communication.
“The hardest thing deaf people face during the war is not only the bombing,” Kuraz explained. “It is being unable to access information when they need it most.”
That information gap can become lethal during Israeli attacks. A deaf Palestinian may not hear an explosion nearby or understand that another strike could follow. In displacement shelters, they may miss shouted instructions. When evacuation orders circulate, inaccessible communication can leave people dependent on relatives, neighbors, or interpreters to understand where they are expected to go.
Even then, another question remains: where can they actually flee?
Gaza’s War Is Creating More Hearing Disabilities
The crisis extends far beyond Palestinians who were deaf before October 2023.
Before the war, an estimated 20,000 people in Gaza were living with hearing disabilities, according to figures cited in the source report. Field workers now estimate that between 30,000 and 40,000 Palestinians may be living with hearing loss or impairment, including many children.
Explosions themselves are creating new disabilities.
A July 2025 assessment by the Global Protection Cluster estimated that more than 35,000 people in Gaza had suffered significant hearing damage from explosions. Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children also screened 32,753 Palestinians between December 2024 and August 2025 and identified 2,500 children and adults with new hearing impairments directly resulting from the conflict.
Those figures do not represent the full scale of the problem. Comprehensive tracking has become extraordinarily difficult amid mass displacement, destruction of medical facilities and the collapse of rehabilitation services.
The result is an expanding population of Palestinians confronting hearing loss at precisely the moment when Gaza has fewer resources available to support them.
For those who suddenly lose their hearing after an explosion, the psychological and practical shock can be profound. Palestinians who have been deaf since birth may already communicate through sign language and have established ways of navigating the hearing world. Someone who suddenly loses their hearing in a bombing may have neither sign-language skills nor an established support network.
They must learn how to live without sound while simultaneously trying to survive a war.
A Classroom Where Teachers Must Hide Their Fear
Kuraz continues travelling between educational sites established by the Atfaluna Society across displacement areas in Gaza City, including al-Shati, al-Nasr, Sheikh Radwan, al-Jalaa and Tal al-Hawa.
Many are little more than tents inside shelter centers.
His work is no longer simply about education. He checks whether displaced deaf families have recently arrived, whether students need hearing-aid batteries and whether children have developed hearing problems following another night of explosions.
At one educational site, a distant explosion sent vibrations through the area. Some deaf children froze and looked towards Kuraz.
His responsibility in that moment was not merely to explain what had happened. He had to control his own fear because the children were reading his face.
“I have to control my emotions and my facial expressions within seconds,” he said. “If I lose that control, the children will lose their sense of safety.”
Teachers then redirected the children towards games and activities until they were laughing again.
Kuraz, however, carries the suppressed fear home.
“The fear I suppress during the day catches up with me at night,” he said.
Cut Off From Information, Services and Equipment
Hearing impairment also creates obstacles far beyond immediate physical danger.
Many shelters, medical facilities and humanitarian services are not designed around the communication needs of deaf Palestinians. Sign-language interpretation is limited, while displacement has scattered communities and separated people from established support networks.
Hearing aids create another vulnerability. They require batteries, maintenance and replacement components, items that have become increasingly difficult to obtain amid Gaza’s shortages and restrictions on essential supplies.
Rehabilitation centers providing speech therapy, psychological support and specialized education have also been damaged or destroyed.
In response, Palestinians have created their own small networks of survival.
Murtaja, who graduated from a school for deaf Palestinians and later attended university through a programme designed for deaf students, helps administer a WhatsApp group distributing political, humanitarian and security information among members of Gaza’s deaf community.
In a war where information can determine whether someone survives the next few minutes, a WhatsApp message can become a substitute for the warning a deaf person cannot hear.
An Invisible Crisis Within Gaza’s Catastrophe
The experience of Gaza’s deaf Palestinians reveals another dimension of the war that casualty statistics alone cannot capture.
War does not affect every civilian in the same way. A warning that reaches one person may never reach another. An evacuation announcement that appears straightforward to a hearing person may be inaccessible to someone who cannot hear it. A bombardment that creates terror through its sound can create an entirely different terror for someone who experiences only the vibrations and terrified faces around them.
For Gaza’s deaf community, survival has become dependent on watching other people run, reading fear on faces, receiving messages through phones and relying on a shrinking network of interpreters, teachers and relatives.
Meanwhile, Israeli bombardment is creating new hearing disabilities, expanding the number of Palestinians who will require long-term rehabilitation, assistive devices and specialised education in a territory where much of the infrastructure needed to provide those services has been destroyed.
Yet Kuraz continues moving between Gaza’s makeshift classrooms, translating a reality his students cannot hear and trying to prevent his own fear from becoming theirs.
The questions confronting deaf Palestinians remain painfully simple: What happened? Where was the bombing? Should we run? Where should we go?
For thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who cannot hear the bombs, finding the answers has itself become an act of survival.
