GAZA CITY: The vintage beige Mercedes would be eye-catching anywhere in the world, but it is especially so on the streets of impoverished Gaza City.
Munir Al-Shandi, 42, is among a handful of vintage car enthusiasts in the Gaza Strip, defying a punishing Israeli siege imposed on the Palestinian coastal enclave to pursue a passionate hobby.
As he drives a 1929 Mercedes-Benz Gazelle, which he restored, through Gaza’s cratered roads, young children run after him in excitement, reaching out to touch the car’s pristine bodywork.
“Everyone in the street is amazed and asks to take pictures,” Shandi, a mechanic, told AFP as he showcased the replica of the vintage car he had assembled in his workshop.
“The restoration would have been faster and the quality and shape better if the materials had been available.”
Around 2.3 million Palestinians live in the territory, which has been under a crippling Israeli blockade since the Islamist group Hamas seized power there in 2007.
There is a ban on importing a range of goods, including car parts, as Israel claims these may be used in producing explosives to be used against it.
Israel says that its land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza is necessary to protect it from rocket and other attacks from Hamas.
But such obstacles have not stopped Shandi, and the Gazelle is not the only vintage vehicle he has rebuilt.
He is also the proud owner of a 1946 Armstrong Siddeley Hurricane, which he has restored.
Shandi began work on the Gazelle in 2015 at his workshop in eastern Gaza City.
He used locally available items as much as possible, although he also had to rely on friends outside Gaza to procure some spare parts.
His friends brought the parts in through the Rafah crossing on Gaza’s border with Egypt, he said.
“I brought in through friends of mine in the UAE some spare parts for the car, and they in turn imported them from America, but they took eight months to arrive,” he said.
The restoration took a whole year.
Shandi said his passion developed as a child, and at 15 he began working in a garage.
He left Gaza in 2003 for the United Arab Emirates, where he worked with a company specializing in old and vintage cars that gave him a wealth of experience.
In 2009, he returned to the Gaza Strip, where he opened his workshop and poured any profits into his hobby — restoring vintage cars.
With its red leather and wooden interior, Shandi’s Mercedes has only fueled his passion for classic cars of the past.
Two years ago, he found his next project — the wreck of a British Armstrong Siddeley Hurricane, a luxury vehicle that was produced between 1946 and 1953.
“The car has its original engine. I tried to match it with its original shape by using certain parts from other cars or close to them, and I modified them,” Shandi said.
In his workshop hang the frames of a 1960 German Audi and a 1951 American Ford, as well as a 1975 Swedish Saab.
He is determined to restore all three vehicles.
Shandi said a number of people have contacted him to offer vast sums for the restored cars, but he turned them down.
“This is a hobby,” he said. “The cars are not for sale, although many people abroad have contacted me and asked to buy them.”
Even if he did want to sell, “getting them out of the Strip would be impossible because of the blockade.”
Several years ago, Shandi applied for a permit to work in Israel, but was denied. The increased income would have allowed him to restore more vehicles, he added.
His dream is to take part in an “international exhibition” for vintage cars, but that may have to wait.
Classic cars back on the road — in Gaza City
https://arab.news/raf9n
Classic cars back on the road — in Gaza City
- “Everyone in the street is amazed and asks to take pictures,” Shandi, a mechanic, told AFP as he showcased the replica of the vintage car he had assembled in his workshop
- He is also the proud owner of a 1946 Armstrong Siddeley Hurricane, which he has restored
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
