Solar Gaza and Why Rooftop Solar Became a Lifeline in Gaza

Non-Profit Organization Brings Free Solar Energy To The People Of Gaza

Photo shared on Twitter by Naji Abu Shaaban, the engineer behind the Solar Gaza campaign

Solar Gaza was a small volunteer campaign, launched around 2015 and reportedly led by Gaza engineer Naji Abu Shaaban, that asked donors to fund rooftop solar units for homes, clinics and street lights in the Gaza Strip instead of only sending food and blankets. Its argument was simple: in a place where the grid delivered power for only a few hours a day, a solar panel and a battery could keep lights, fridges and water pumps running, and could create local jobs in installation.

The campaign itself was modest and is hard to trace in detail today. The idea behind it, however, turned out to be right. Over the following decade rooftop solar became one of the main ways families, hospitals and businesses in Gaza kept the lights on. This article explains what the group proposed, why electricity was such a pressing problem, and what happened to solar power in Gaza after 2015.

What Solar Gaza set out to do

According to the campaign's own website, solargazalights.org, the group was formed by engineers who wanted to use their technical skills for people in need. Its plan had three parts:

Home units. The group estimated that one solar unit costing about $1,500 could power a family's fridge, lamps, water pump and small appliances.
Public lighting. Abu Shaaban talked about solar-powered street lamps to make streets safer after dark.
Local work. Installers would be hired from the community, so the money would also support the local economy.

The campaign admitted that many donors were puzzled at first. Solar panels did not look like humanitarian aid in the way food parcels do. Its answer was that, in its words, "giving solar power units is giving electricity independence to Gaza", and that steady power makes almost every other kind of help work better.

Independent reporting on the group itself is thin, and we could not confirm how many units it eventually installed. Treat its figures as the campaign's own estimates.

Why electricity was such a problem in Gaza

Gaza's power problems go back many years. Its only power station, the Gaza Power Plant, was built in 2002. In June 2006 Israeli air strikes destroyed its transformers; it was rebuilt to run at a reduced output, and it was hit again in July 2014. The plant runs on diesel, so its output depended on fuel deliveries under the blockade and on who paid for that fuel.

By 2016, reporting by AsiaNews put Gaza's demand at about 450 megawatts, while only around 250 megawatts was available: roughly 27% bought from Israel, 22% from the local plant and 6% from Egypt. The rest simply did not exist. In practice, many households had electricity for only a few hours a day, in rotating schedules.

What daily life without steady power looks like

Long blackouts affect almost everything:

Health care. Hospitals depend on backup generators and fuel. Reports from the period described medical staff working by the light of mobile phones during outages; such accounts are hard to verify one by one, but the strain on hospitals was well documented by aid agencies.
Safety at home. Families turned to generators, kerosene heaters and candles. In 2016 Gaza health officials said fires and explosions from generators and candles had recently killed 24 people, most of them children.
Water and sanitation. Pumps and treatment plants stop when the power does, which affects drinking water and sewage.
Work and school. Shops cannot keep food frozen, workshops stop, and children study by torchlight.

Seen against this, Solar Gaza's pitch made sense. A rooftop system does not fix a grid, but it can keep one household or one clinic going through the hours when the grid is dead.

How solar spread after 2015

Gaza has plenty of sunshine and few rainy days, which helps. By 2016 the Gaza Energy Authority was approving solar panels for schools, hospitals and public buildings. Its head of solar projects, Abou Raed al-Hajj, spoke of raising renewable output from about 3 megawatts to 15 megawatts within three years, with panels on the roofs of at least 10,000 homes.

Cost was the main obstacle. Import restrictions had kept panels out or made them expensive; as some of those limits eased, prices fell, but a household system still cost several thousand euros at a time when about half the population lived below the poverty line. In 2018 the World Bank offered grants for solar installations at hospitals and in refugee camps. Panel sellers in Gaza later described years of strong demand, with better-off families usually the first to buy.

Solar power during the war since 2023

After the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel announced a complete siege of Gaza, cutting electricity and fuel. The Gaza Power Plant reportedly shut down on 11 October 2023 after running out of fuel. Hospitals warned that patients on life-support equipment, including premature babies in incubators, were at risk.

In those conditions, households with rooftop panels were among the few with any power at all. Climate Home News spoke to residents who used their panels to charge phones and run basic appliances, while others lost theirs to bombing. One teacher said he had paid $8,000 in instalments for eight panels, and that several were damaged. The war has since destroyed much of Gaza's housing and infrastructure, and any rebuilding of its energy system is likely to lean heavily on solar.

Lessons from a small campaign

Energy is humanitarian aid. Light, refrigeration and clean water all depend on electricity, so power can multiply the value of other help.
Decentralised beats centralised in a crisis. One power station can be shut down or bombed in a day. Thousands of small rooftop systems are harder to knock out completely.
Cost and access decide who benefits. Without grants or affordable imports, solar tends to reach the wealthiest first.
Check before you give. If you want to support energy projects in Gaza, choose established organisations with transparent reporting, and look for recent information, since conditions change quickly.

Solar Gaza's founders saw early that sunlight was one resource nobody could blockade. A decade later, that idea matters even more.

Sources: Wikipedia: Gaza Power Plant; AsiaNews: Without electricity, Gaza invests in solar panels (July 2016); Climate Home News: Rooftop solar panels offer fragile lifeline to besieged Gazans (2023); campaign statement on the Solar Gaza website (solargazalights.org); original report by John Vibes for True Activist; photo credit Naji Abu Shaaban via Twitter.

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