Mariam Abultewi is sitting at a small wooden desk, pitching her company's smartphone app, when the airstrike hits.

A laptop sits in front of her, and a whiteboard hangs nearby, filled with colored scribbles. Several other twenty-somethings sit at desks across the room. Most are typing on their own laptops, and one draws animations on a tablet, as a few colleagues watch over his shoulder. A familiar chirp bounces from desk to desk—the sound of messages arriving on Facebook.

The vibe is typical of a startup accelerator—one of those communal spaces where new companies bootstrap their ideas—and as she pitches her app, Abultewi sounds a lot like any other young entrepreneur. She describes the app, Wasselni, as a social networking tool that hails taxis and private cars, echoing services like Uber and Lyft. But then the explosions rattle the building, as Israeli planes attack downtown Gaza City, a few miles away.

The Gaza Strip sits between Israel and the Mediterranean (click to enlarge) Wikipedia

Abultewi goes quiet, and so does everyone else in the room. The sound of so many clacking keyboards is replaced by the crash of bombs in the distance. One woman stands, puts her hands together, and says Halas!—Arabic for "enough"—before leaving the room. But soon, the clatter of the keyboards resumes, and Abultewi, a slender 25-year-old dressed in a light-blue hijab, continues her pitch. Soon, it's business as usual at Gaza Sky Geeks, the first startup accelerator in the Gaza Strip, home to one of the world's oldest geopolitical conflicts.

Over the past seven years, Gaza has endured three wars between Israel and Hamas—the democratically empowered Islamic organization determined to reclaim Palestine from Israel—and a civil war between Hamas and Fatah, the secular Palestinian political party that rules the West Bank. Initiated by a Hamas attack on Israel, the most recent conflict left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead and more than 10,000 injured, and it devastated the local infrastructure, destroying more than 18,000 homes, depriving more than 450,000 civilians of municipal water, and blanketing the region in extended blackouts after an airstrike on Gaza's only power plant.

>'This is why I do what I am doing—to have a normal life away from bombs and danger.'

But here in this room on the sixth floor of a small office building on the outskirts of Gaza City, young entrepreneurs like Abultewi are still intent on bringing new internet technologies to their sliver of land between Israel and the Mediterranean and, crucially, to other parts of the Middle East and North Africa. That may seem a Sisyphean task, and perhaps even a pointless one, given the basic amenities needed throughout the region. But Gaza Sky Geeks—created by Mercy Corps, a global aid agency that has for more than a decade worked to improve life in Gaza—provides much-needed employment for local youth and a potential path to economic recovery.

These young entrepreneurs, reflecting attitudes held across the region, believe Gazans should have everything we have in the west, including technologies that provide instant access to information and streamline how the world works. But they also want to build careers for themselves. They want to prove their worth. They want to live their lives as anyone else would.

As the airstrike blasts subside on this August day and Mariam Abultewi finishes her pitch, she goes back to work. So does Hadeel Elsafadi, 24, the founder of a digital animation startup called Newtoon. "These bombings have become normal for me and everyone here," she says. "This is why I do what I am doing—to have a normal life away from bombs and danger." Her work, she explains, is not just for her, but also for her two younger brothers. "I want them to have a future, and I want to have a future as well."

In this 2009 photo, a Palestinian student reacts as he surveys a classroom damaged by Israeli shelling during the first day of classes at a United Nations school in northern Gaza. Kevin Frayer / AP

Indeed, this day is not unusual. A few hours before the bombings, another entrepreneur, Alaa Alsalehi, the 29-year-old CEO of a Gaza startup called Serve Me, sits in a house not far from the accelerator's offices, remembering another recent airstrike. Sipping from a cup of tea and occasionally stroking his goatee and mustache, he says the strike came during a Skype call where he was pitching his company's mobile privacy tools to a group of VCs. As they looked on from across the internet, he broke down in tears.

Even on the good days, he and his fellow entrepreneurs are hamstrung by slow and intermittent internet access. On others, there's no electricity or no water. When his home lost power this summer, he moved Serve Me into his brother's home, which had a generator. At Gaza Sky Geeks, his colleagues used a car battery to keep their phones powered. But as he discusses their hardships, he doesn't complain. "We love to do our work," he says.

Inside the Blockade

Seven years ago, after the rise of Hamas, Israel blockaded the Gaza Strip. This prevents anyone from leaving, and it keeps people, goods and crucial reconstruction materials from entering the region. Among other things, the blockade severely limits the prospects of the younger generation. According to the World Health Organization, the unemployment rate among Gazans 20 to 24 exceeds 70 percent.

For Iliana Montauk, one solution is to fund the creation of internet businesses, which can transcend borders. As the digital economy program director at Mercy Corps, a non-governmental organization based in Portland, Oregon, Montauk helped create Gaza Sky Geeks in 2011, drawing on funding from Google and, later, other stateside organizations. "We basically saw there was a market on two sides," she says. "The investors wanted to invest in Gazans, and Gazans wanted to launch their startups. But they didn't have access to each other."

Gaza Sky Geeks entrepreneurs inside the accelerator's office on the outskirts of Gaza City. From left to right: Hani Mortaja, Said Hassan, Mohammed M. Albatran, Motaz Hanya, Moamin Salamah Abu Ewaida, and Abd El-Rahman Qarmout. Gaza Sky Geeks

Backed by a Google grant made through the Arab Developer Network Initiative, Gaza Sky Geeks began offering "startup weekends" where aspiring entrepreneurs could meet with successful tech founders and venture capitalists from other parts of the world. Montauk admits it was slow going—there wasn't "too much interest in the beginning," she says—but as word spread and more local and international businesses and organizations offered support, young Gazans gravitated to these meetups.

Said Hassan, a Gaza Sky Geeks entrepreneur who also serves as a marketing consultant for the accelerator, remembers the low turnout at the first meetings. But eventually, he says, the program provided an outlet for ideas already percolating in the city's cafes and coffee shops. Perhaps more importantly, it provided jobs, with the accelerator working to facilitate investments in new startups. "For all of us, it's about building a community," he explains one afternoon in a colleague's home in the city's Tal al-hews district. "What we are creating will be the only hope for young graduates in Gaza to find work."

Working with Middle Eastern venture capital firms such as Palinno and Oasis 500, the accelerator has since October 2013 helped secure investments in four startups ranging from $15,000 to $20,000. It also provides these fledgling companies with space in its Gaza City offices. And through another partner, Blackbox Connect, it's bootstrapping a two-week startup immersion program for Gazan entrepreneurs in California's Silicon Valley. When the accelerator announced its latest startup weekend, held in June as Israel and Hamas exchanged missile fire across the region, over 600 young Gazans applied.

The ruins of homes in Khuza’a, Gaza, after an aerial and ground bombardment from the Israeli Defense Forces. Armando Cordoba

'Investors Invest in People'

When Mariam Abultewi attended her first startup weekend in 2011, she knew little about building a company. During these meetups, entrepreneurs pitch ideas and vote on who should win a meeting with potential investors, and she received only one vote: her own.

But she learned what sells—"investors invest in people," she says—and when she returned the next year, she won a spot in the accelerator. By 2012, with help from Gaza Sky Geeks—and with the approval of the Israeli government—she traveled to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt to pitch her taxi-hailing app to investors. Eventually, she landed an investment from Palinno, a Palestinian operation that works in both Gaza and the West Bank. It was one of the first startup investments in Gaza, and she sees it as a step toward changing attitudes that still linger in the Middle East.

Aspiring entrepreneurs discuss their work as part of a program called Intalqi, a Gaza Sky Geeks effort to promote startups from female founders. Gaza Sky Geeks

"People don’t believe we have the ability to do this type of work because we live in a closed area," says Abultewi, who lives with her mother, father, and six siblings in a home partially destroyed by a recent Israeli Air Force strike. "We can't reach people and don't know how to properly develop the applications to international standards...Our professors in the universities are not good enough. Our technical developers are not great enough. And we need to make connections with those people who have great experiences in these areas so we can learn and develop."

Hadeel Elsafadi echoes these words. She launched her startup, Newtoon, out of an office at Gaza's Islamic University in 2011 as part of a business-development program called Mobaderoon. The idea was to create animations for games, movies, and other media. With tech innovation booming across the Middle East and North Africa, she knew there was an ample market for such technologies—"no one else was doing it," she says—but despite working with Mobaderoon and SPARK, another business incubator, she lacked the resources to make it happen.

>'This life is not normal, and for these startups everything is hard. But we are still working toward finding success and working hard to achieve our dreams.'

Elsafadi first worked with Gaza Sky Geeks at the end of 2012, and she reconnected with the accelerator this year through a program called Intalqi, which seeks to increase the number of women in the local startup world. Intalqi, run from the Gaza Sky Geeks offices, is a kind of mentoring program where "big sisters" advise "little sisters" like Elsafadi. One of her big sisters was Sara Chemaa, a strategy and business development manager for the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation in Dubai. Elsafadi calls the experience "invaluable," explaining that Chemaa provided crucial insights into how her startup should approach the commercial market, and one result is a growing company.

Today, Newtoon's services are available not only in Gaza but Amman, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and Elsafadi's company is planning further expansion across the Middle East and North Africa. With startups like this, says Mercy Corps' Montauk, the goal is to keep them in constant touch with mentors and investors—while continuing to support them in other ways. In October, Gaza Sky Geeks will launch a crowdfunding campaign to give some of the accelerator's startups, including Newtoon, another source of capital.

'You Will See'

After sitting with Abultewi and Elsafadi in the wake the airstrike, I pack up my things, leave the office, and walk onto the elevator. Said Hassan, a kind of spokesperson for the accelerator, joins me on the ride down. "You see what we are up against?" he says. "This life is not normal, and for these startups everything is hard. But we are still working toward finding success and working hard to achieve our dreams."

His words resonate as we walk onto the street. Plumes of smoke billow in the sky above downtown Gaza City, and drones circle overhead, buzzing as they move around the buildings. It's a familiar sound for Gazans. They call it "zanana," the Arabic word for bug. But upstairs on the sixth floor, Abultewi and Elsafadi continue their work.

Christopher Schroeder describes their work as unique. In his book Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East, he closely chronicles the rise of the new tech culture across the region, and he's seen nothing that compares with efforts in Gaza. "I have traveled all across the Middle East and seen remarkable startups and entrepreneurs, at scale, everywhere," he says. "But that it was possible under the circumstances of Gaza still amazed me."

The impact of this movement, he says, shouldn't be underestimated. "We, in the West, see one narrative of the Middle East on the news, and that narrative is real, important, and worrisome," he says. "But it misses the significant access to technology, which means bottom-up problem-solving and ideas for futures—economic and otherwise—that top-down institutions not only don't understand but really should embrace. There are huge youth bubbles across the region, and young people taking hold of visions for their own futures is a good thing."

A Palestinian searches through the remains of his home, hit by Israeli strikes in Towers Al-andaa in the northern Gaza Strip this past July. Shareef Sarhan / UN Photo

Certainly, some perspective is required. "There have been about 20,000 homes that have been destroyed," says Rana Qumsiyeh, the public engagement manager for the humanitarian organization World Vision Jerusalem, Gaza, and West Bank, in the wake of the most recent conflict in the region. "Soon, it's going to be winter, and they're going to be seeking shelter somewhere." But Qumsiyeh believes efforts to bootstrap local startups will prove beneficial in their own way, helping to ensure a better life for the youth of today and for future generations.

Yes, there may be economic benefits. But Gaza Sky Geeks is about pride as much as anything else. Alsalehi, the CEO of Serve Me, says the biggest challenge he and his fellow entrepreneurs face isn't poor infrastructure or the constant threat of war, but attracting international investment. "Some of the investors might think that because we are from Gaza, our products are not reliable and not professional, but it's simply not true," he says. "We are just as good as anyone else and are working hard to do so. Just give us a chance and you will see."

Their ultimate goal, he explains, isn't complicated. They want to show the world that they can do what anyone else can do.

Armando Cordoba is a freelance journalist based out of Melbourne, Australia. Born in the U.S., he has covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Mexico, and other parts of The Americas as well as Israel and Gaza, writing for USA Today, the Associated Press, AFP, and other news outlets.