When Ayat Hani needs to get somewhere in Gaza, the hardest part isn't the broken roads or the heat. It's the change.
Getting around after over two years of Israel's genocide in Gaza has become an exercise in negotiation and humiliation, the pregnant mother of two didn't anticipate.
"Every time I try to take a ride, I can't find anyone who'll accept payment without exact change, and I never have it," Ayat, who lives in the Sahaba neighbourhood in central Gaza, tells The New Arab. She ends up waiting on the street for stretches at a time, or walking distances she shouldn't be walking, in the sun, in her condition. "It's exhausting and embarrassing sometimes," she adds. Her daily struggle points to a compounding crisis that has quietly overtaken Gaza's transportation network, one that sits at the intersection of war , economic collapse , and technological exclusion. No cash, no ride Cash has nearly vanished from circulation. Small bills, the kind needed for a cab fare, are essentially impossible to come by. Fuel prices have sent transport costs to roughly five times what they were before the war. And digital payment solutions, the kind that might seem like an obvious workaround, run up against a population that is, in large part, cut off from the infrastructure those solutions require.
Amani Abu Sa'da is in her sixties and displaced to the Nasr neighbourhood in western Gaza City. She doesn't own a smartphone. She has no banking app, no e-wallet, no way to access any payment system that runs on a screen.
"Almost all of my life is inside the camp," she tells The New Arab . "I only go out when absolutely necessary."
Even when she musters the will to leave, the fractured roads and her inability to walk long distances quickly exhaust her options.
"Even if I find a vehicle, I have no way to pay." She describes the feeling plainly, without drama: she is stuck.
Fourteen-year-old Ghazal Murshid, displaced to the Tuffah neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City, navigates this same landscape every time she tries to get to her English language class.
Her solution has been to negotiate with drivers, asking them to take her and accept payment on the return trip, when she might have scraped together the fare. Most refuse.
"The waiting is long, and it affects my focus," she says, though she keeps going anyway. A startup born from a bus stop These are the conditions that Mohammed Abu Jiab says drove his team at Aqlam Tech Gaza to develop what they're calling "Bitaqaty", Arabic for "My Card."
"There is a compounded crisis around transportation," Mohammed tells The New Arab , "given the absence of cash and small change from more than 95 percent of people's hands and from the markets."
The team could have tried to build another digital wallet or app-based payment platform. They didn't, because they concluded it would fail before it launched.
Gaza's mobile network still operates largely on 2G. Internet access during transit is unreliable at best, nonexistent at worst.
Many residents lost their phones during the war; the devices available on the market are priced beyond most people's reach.
"The problem of keeping up with technological development still exists," Mohammed notes, "whether through smartphones or the internet."
So they went in the opposite direction. The Bitaqaty card is paper. A rider buys one not from a station or an app but from supermarkets and point-of-sale outlets distributed across the territory, then boards a vehicle.
At the end of the ride, they hand the driver the card. That's it. The rider's role is finished.
"Our slogan was clear," Mohammed shares. "No smartphones. No internet." Paper, but not simple The simplicity is intentional, but so is the security. The cards are made to physical specifications designed to resist damage, duplication, and fraud.
Each one carries encoded data that can only be read through a dedicated application installed on the driver's phone.
From the rider's perspective, it looks like handing over a bus ticket. From the system's perspective, it's a verified, encrypted transaction. The settlement side of the equation happens later. At the end of his working day, the driver scans the QR code on each collected card, logs into the financial settlement system, and receives the corresponding fare transferred to his bank account, processed in cycles every twelve hours.
The cards themselves are not financial instruments in the traditional sense; they are purpose-built for transit and nothing else.
Mohammed describes the concept as loosely borrowed from metro ticketing systems: the rider buys before boarding, but adapted to an environment without stations, without consistent power, and without assuming anyone has functioning technology in their pocket.
"The citizen here doesn't buy the ticket from a station, but from the supermarket and the points of sale that are spread around," he explains.
What his team has tried to build is essentially a bridge: a low-tech interface that connects to a more complex financial backend, without requiring either party, rider or driver, to navigate that complexity in real time, on the road, in the middle of a war.
Roughly 500 drivers have already registered to work within the system across Gaza's governorates, according to Mohammed, a number he describes as evidence that the market was waiting for exactly this kind of solution.
Whether the card can scale and sustain itself amid Gaza's ongoing instability remains to be seen.
The infrastructure it relies on, the supermarkets where cards are sold, the banking system that processes driver settlements, and the phones on which drivers scan codes all exist within a context of constant disruption.
Power cuts, displacement, and the war's unpredictable pace can interrupt any of these links at any time.
But the problem the card is trying to solve is real, immediate, and affecting people at the most basic level of daily movement.
For Ayat Hani, the ability to board a vehicle without needing to produce exact change, while pregnant, in summer heat, after waiting too long on a broken street, is not a convenience.
It's a measure of whether she can function at all in a city that has been systematically stripped of the ordinary mechanisms that make life move.
"I wish for a real and quick solution to the transportation crisis," she says, "so people can move more comfortably in their daily lives."
The card, for now, is what someone managed to build. Ansam Al-Kitaa is a freelance journalist based in Gaza. For years, she has covered the successive wars in Gaza and their humanitarian and social impacts for international and local outlets This piece is published in collaboration with Egab