Coronavirus: The women fighting back against Covid-19 in Gaza with hackathons, meditation and yoga

With Gaza seeing its first cases of Covid-19, Anne-Marie Tomchak speaks to women who have been using their expertise in tech to crowdsource solutions to the pandemic

Ghada Ibrahim, 33, is a Code Academy programme officer and yogi. She has three children aged four, nine and 10 (Asmaa Elkhaldi)

Before Covid-19 I felt like a prisoner. As an ambitious person, living in Gaza is like living in a cage,” says Dalia, a 36-year-old social media coordinator based in the Strip. “Last year I got a permit to travel to Jordan for work. I was like a free bird. Now I feel like a prisoner again.”

The cage Dalia refers to is a small patch of self-governing Palestinian land about the length of a marathon with a population of around 2 million people. In other words, it’s packed. There are serious concerns for how its already fragile health system will cope, now the first cases of coronavirus have arrived.

“We only have something like 70 ICU beds,” says Dalia. “The situation in Gaza was disastrous before. If this virus spreads… I’m worried.”