Real Lives
Rizq Abo Halima runs a dental clinic from a Gaza tent
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Rizq Sufyan Abo Halima, 31, pulls teeth and fills cavities in a tent pitched in an alley in Gaza City's al-Nasr neighbourhood, a few metres from the rubble of the clinic he built last year. His first practice, Smile One in Sheikh Zayed City in the north, was bombed in the opening weeks of the war in 2023.
He opened again in May last year in al-Nasr and lost that clinic three months later when Israeli forces assaulted the area, weeks before the ceasefire of last October, Al Jazeera's Nour Abo Aisha reported this week from the tent.
The economics of a chair#
A dentist in Gaza City today needs a room before he needs a drill. Before the war Abo Halima rented a whole apartment for his clinic for 500 shekels a month, about 166 dollars. Apartments now go for closer to 1,000 dollars, in a city where the UN Satellite Centre says more than four in five buildings have been destroyed or severely damaged.
So he rebuilt his practice under canvas and set his prices against the tent, not against the market. An extraction costs 50 shekels, about 17 dollars. A filling in the apartment clinics that survive costs around 350 shekels, roughly 116 dollars.
"I am here, enduring the harsh summer heat, so that I can protect people from the high prices."
Rizq Abo Halima, dentist, Gaza City, to Al Jazeera
The heat was his first engineering problem. "I had to adjust the corners of the tent and lift it at the ends to allow air to pass through," he said.
Who works with him#
Heba Rihan, 23, a nursing graduate of Al-Aqsa University, joined the tent in May. She described the day a patient chose to have a healthy tooth pulled because he could bear neither the pain nor the cost of saving it as the hardest she has had there.
Yousef Abo Halima, 25, a patient, put the calculation from the other side of the chair: he can handle the heat inside the tent, he said, but not the price of fillings in the clinics that operate inside apartments.
The tent is one of hundreds of improvised surgeries. Al Jazeera reported that hundreds of dental clinics were destroyed during the war and others closed for lack of equipment and supplies, with 1,800 health facilities across Gaza damaged or destroyed. The National reported in April that Israeli restrictions on painkilling drugs were forcing Gaza's dentists to work with less anaesthetic than a procedure needs.
Abo Halima has now opened a practice three times in three years. Each time the address changed and the trade did not.
