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The mother of five has carefully looked after the lighter. Her son has repaired it several times since it became difficult to buy a new one after Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.

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Firewood has become essential for 46-year-old Rabab. She uses it to bake bread, heat water for her children, prepare food and make tea amid shortages of cooking gas and soaring fuel prices.

“Our whole daily life depends on fire,” Rabab told Al Jazeera. “But getting a fire started begins with a lighter and this small object has become one of the hardest things to find in Gaza.”

Before the war, lighters were so cheap and readily available that she remembers buying three for one shekel ($0.33). Today, a new lighter can cost between $27-33 and Rabab last spent $12 to repair her old lighter.

“Should I spend that amount on a lighter, or should I buy a bag of flour?” she asked.

Palestinians in Gaza would rather spend their limited money on food, so a single lighter is often passed around families in several tents.

Some days, Rabab cannot find a lighter at all, so her family has been forced to spend days eating cold food or waiting until a neighbour has a fire burning to borrow a spark.

She often sends a piece of cardboard to a neighbour to get a light off their fire and bring it home. Other times, if a neighbour is baking bread, she may ask to use their oven to prepare food for her family.

The lighter is now something she guards carefully, as it is, for her, the starting point for fire, food, bread and hot water.

A second struggle

Nearby, Hasnaa Mansour, 43, faces the same problem but from a different angle.

Displaced from Jabalia refugee camp, Hasnaa sits beside a clay oven she had treasured since her family’s financial situation deteriorated during the war.

Her husband previously worked as a tailor and the family lived relatively comfortably, but due to a lack of business, Hasnaa now bakes and sells food to help support their six children.

Hasnaa has repeatedly repaired her lighter because buying a new one is beyond her means.

But a shortage of cooking gas has made the problem even worse.

“With gas, all you need is a small spark to light it. But with the oven, I need a real fire,” she said.

“I’ve been sitting here since the morning and by 10 o’clock I still couldn’t light the oven. I sent my young daughter with a piece of cardboard to look for someone who had a fire burning, but she couldn’t find anyone.”

Restrictions and shortages

The lighter shortage comes amid Israel’s continued siege on Gaza.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says restrictions on the movement of goods and closures of crossings have contributed to shortages and rising prices of essential supplies. OCHA also says items classified by Israeli authorities as “dual-use” face additional difficulties in obtaining approval to enter Gaza.

The Gaza Chamber of Commerce and Industry said in June that restrictions on crossings and the mechanisms for bringing commercial shipments into Gaza continued to limit the flow of goods.

It said that more than 30,000 trucks entered Gaza during the first five months of 2026, an average of no more than 191 trucks a day – still far below the territory’s daily pre-war needs.

In an earlier publication, the chamber of commerce documented the emergence of lighter-repair work during the war, saying lighters were among items prevented from entering Gaza.

That is why lighters are now so valuable and families spend relatively large amounts to fix them rather than buy a new one.

Sharing a single lighter

For Shadi Abu Shamlah, a displaced father living with his family at Al-Karmel School west of Gaza City, the shortage means sharing a lighter among tents.

“The whole school here… you wouldn’t find more than four lighters,” he said.

The few available lighters move from one tent to another as families try to cook, heat water or prepare hot drinks.

“The lighter today is the backbone of life. If you have a lighter in your tent, you’re okay. If you don’t have one, you’re stuck,” he said.

“The simplest things need fire. You want a cup of tea, you want to cook, you want to make milk for a child… you need fire.”

Abu Shamlah says his family sometimes goes to bed without dinner because they cannot light a fire.

Repairing lighters has also become difficult. He says a lighter flint can cost 25 to 30 shekels ($8–$10), while people have resorted to using gas from larger cylinders to refill lighters, sometimes causing burns.

Tamer Al-Shawish, who worked as a driver before the war, turned to fixing lighters to help provide for his family.

On a small stall near Al Karmel school camp, the 24-year-old father of two says his new profession was previously unheard of.

“The war has forced us into jobs and work we never knew before. I started repairing lighters so I could provide for my family’s needs,” he told Al Jazeera.

A new profession

“Before the war, no one needed to repair a lighter. They were cheap and available. When the gas ran out, we would throw it away and buy another one.”

“People come to repair the lighter because it is cheaper than buying a new one, especially with the high prices and shortages of basic goods,” Tamer said.

He salvages parts from damaged lighters to repair others.

“Even an old lighter has value now. We take parts from damaged lighters and use them to repair other lighters, so they last longer.” %!s()

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Israel’s Jewish voters in this legislative election will likely be confronted with fundamental questions about the nature of Israeli democracy, the legitimacy of governing coalitions and very different visions of what the state represents.

Palestinian citizens of Israel, at least those who are allowed to vote, are left to hope for a coalition that might curb some of the violence and lawlessness that continues to plague their neighbourhoods.

Social-political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal believes some of the main concerns for Jewish Israeli voters this election will be the far-right coalition government’s attempts to bypass democratic norms and to halt the de facto exemption of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority from conscription.

“One of the most important tasks will be to overturn the nomination of loyal people to many jobs that Netanyahu [has overseen … which] destroyed the civil service and security forces, including the army, Shabak [the Shin Bet], and Mossad,” Bar-Tal told Al Jazeera.

October 7

Overshadowing all is October 7, 2023, when 1,139 people were killed in Hamas-led raids and an Israeli military counteroffensive.

Amplified through endless recycling on the country’s television news networks, October 7 continues to dominate the Israeli popular consciousness, while the 73,387 Palestinians in Gaza killed since then are mostly ignored.

Questions over how Israelis and Palestinians might live together, or even the potential of an independent Palestinian state, as agreed to in the 1990s Oslo Accords, have been completely sidelined.

Instead, Israelis are calling for an inquiry into how that attack was allowed to happen and, specifically, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s role in the security breach.

Netanyahu has repeatedly used the multiple wars he has embarked on since then to argue against holding an inquiry. He has also used these wars to call for a deferment of his trials over alleged corruption.

“There’s a large number of people who just want to get rid of Netanyahu,” prominent Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani told Al Jazeera.

He said that the Israeli opposition, while often almost as right wing as the governing Likud party, is seen simply as the “Anti-Netanyahu bloc”.

“It isn’t just the corruption,” Shenhav-Shahrabani continued. “It’s the sense that he’s at the centre of many of the country’s ills. I get the sense we’ve reached the stage where even [Netanyahu’s party] Likud’s members are reluctant to vote for him.”

Deep states

There are also wider questions over the fundamental nature of governance and democracy in Israel. Many Israelis have criticised Netanyahu for overstepping the country’s political norms, such as attempting to sideline the judiciary, which still has the power to hold his government to account.

The 2023 judicial overhaul, which sought to free the government from much of this judicial oversight, is part of an assault upon the institutions of the state, critics say. Other attacks on these norms include placing loyalists to oversee different branches of the security services, and a sustained campaign by the far right to oust Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.

Baharav-Miara is the official responsible for policing the legality of the coalition’s conduct, and right-wing National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has made her dismissal a condition of joining any future government coalition after the election.

“The issues that matter to voters are almost entirely domestic,” Crisis Group’s Mairav Zonszein told Al Jazeera.

“Chief among them is the divide over the right-wing coalition’s judicial overhaul, which critics view as anti-democratic.

“On the other side, the secular and liberal opposition factions in Israel feel this election is the last chance to save Israeli democracy and restore the institutions that have eroded over Netanyahu’s successive terms.”

Zonszein believes Israeli politicians of all stripes are deliberately avoiding the Palestinian issue and focusing on the domestic concerns of Jewish Israeli voters.

“In short, the Palestinian issue went from being completely ignored and dismissed to still largely sidelined, but with the added consensus that post-October 7th, a state is off the table and now is not the time for it,” she said.

Palestinians voiceless

Most of Israel’s mainstream Jewish parties have ruled out forming a governing coalition with any Arab parties. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has labelled this prospect as “worse” than the October 7 attack.

Even the alliance of former Prime Ministers Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett — whose 2021 government included the Arab Ra’am party — has not committed to bringing parties dominated by Palestinian citizens of Israel into a future coalition.

This would leave many of Israel’s Palestinian citizens without a voice amid endemic violence and organised crime, which many believe the government has deliberately allowed to fester.

That level of neglect can be measured in the death toll. This year, 158 Palestinians citizens of Israel have been murdered.

“Things are much darker now. Strains of Israeli society had always been given to violence and right-wing rhetoric, but the trends that had always been present had accelerated under the current government,” Shenhav-Shahrabani, the sociologist, told Al Jazeera. “It’s gone backwards.”

Many Palestinians also feel that the perceived lawlessness in their neighbourhoods and settler assaults on the occupied West Bank are all designed to prevent them from casting their ballots, Shenhav-Shahrabani said.

“From the pogroms in the West Bank to the violence in Palestinian neighbourhoods, there’s very little sympathy for Palestinians in much of Israel.”

The religious refuseniks

The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community and their parties – Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ) – will likely focus on attempts to conscript their contingent into the military. In the wake of ground deployments to Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox to serve has become one of the most combustible fault lines in Israeli politics today.

Their leaders continue to frame full-time Torah study as their true national calling and a form of “spiritual protection” for the Jewish people.

Thousands of Haredi men blocked thoroughfares in Jerusalem in June to protest attempts to conscript them. This has seen heated rhetoric from secular, but often right-wing, politicians against them.

Yair Golan, a former reserve major general and chairman of the left-leaning Democrats, allegedly called the Haredi “parasites” who “live off the rest of Israeli society” according to one leaked recording.

At street level, the anger has been just as blunt: counterprotesters confronting a Haredi roadblock near Bnei Brak last year held signs reading: “Your brothers will go to war, but you sit here?”

“The prominence given to [it] is strange, given the scale of what’s happening everywhere else. I think it’s a consequence of the heightened militarism that’s been in place since October 7,” Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said, about the disparity in scale between the issue of Haredi recruitment and the genocide in Gaza.

“It’s a world where every soldier’s death is a cause for national mourning, and stories of reservists serving over a year in combat are everywhere. Against that, the ultra-Orthodox’s refusal to join the army is hard to avoid.”

Any one or all of these factors could determine both the outcome of the election and the shape of Israeli politics to come.

Given the political conversation in Israel so far, Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as those trapped within Gaza or living within the occupied West Bank, have scant cause for optimism. %!s()

The Brooks Falls bearcam at Katmai national park in the US was watched 7.3m times between 22 June and 4 August – up 70% from the same period last year and more than double the views it attracted in 2024.

The cameras, run by the wildlife network Explore.org, show brown bears gathering at Brooks Falls waterfall to catch sockeye salmon as they make their way upstream. More than a dozen bears at a time can be spotted prowling around the rocky waters and chomping on the fish.

Candice Rusch, Explore.org’s director of new media, said the surge in viewers appeared to be driven by the bears returning to the falls in large numbers after a less concentrated season last year.

“Last year was a really high salmon run, which meant there was salmon all over the river and the bears didn’t need to congregate at the falls the way they’re doing right now,” she said.

“This year we’ve just had very good views of large congregations of bears.

“It’s like the whole world discovered they could put bearcam on their TV at the same time,” she said. “Maybe people just have it on while they’re cooking dinner.”

The cameras were first installed in 2012 as part of an effort to bring remote wildlife into people’s homes. Rusch said the idea was that people were more likely to protect animals and landscapes they had come to know and care about.

Dr Jeffrey Skibins, an associate professor at East Carolina University, said: “Recent studies have shown that nature-based webcams are beneficial to both wildlife and people. They benefit wildlife by improving conservation attitudes, behaviours and awareness.

“This is not to suggest they are replacements for getting out in nature, but rather serve as viable additions,” he said.

The stream has developed a dedicated fanbase. Viewers can identify individual bears from features such as their ears, noses and body shape, and some keep detailed records of their feeding habits.

One dedicated fan reported watching a bear called Otis eat 42 salmon over several hours, which Rusch said could equate to more than 100,000 calories.

The bears’ gorging will take on added significance next month, when Katmai’s annual Fat Bear Week begins in the autumn. The public votes in a knockout-style competition to crown the park’s fattest bear, as the animals pile on winter weight in preparation for hibernation.

“The bears are great,” Rusch said. “This is an amazing place and it deserves all the love it’s getting.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Rebecca Ratcliffe, Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage. %!s()

Five of those happened in a six-year spell from 2005 until 2010.

Manchester City, in 2019, were the last team to do so - and before that it was Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in 2011.

Only one of the past 15 winners of the Community Shield have gone on to become champions that season.

Since 1992 the teams who lose the Community Shield have won more league titles that season - 10 in total, including Manchester City for three years in a row between 2021 and 2023.

Last year Crystal Palace beat Liverpool and ended up finishing 15th, although they did go on to win the Conference League. The Reds also had a disappointing domestic campaign, finishing fifth.

Some 47% of the time (16/34) the upcoming season's Premier League winners had not been involved in the Community Shield - like Arsenal in 2025-26.

And 53% of the time (18/34) the Shield winners have finished above the losers in the league that season.

On 10 occasions the two teams have finished as the top two in the Premier League - with four of those times being the Shield winners top and the losers as runners-up.

This one is a bit of a mixed bag.

Crystal Palace's 2025 scorers Jean-Philippe Mateta and Ismaila Sarr netted 37 goals between them last season.

Hugo Ekitike scored his first of 17 goals in his debut season for Liverpool - but Jeremie Frimpong did not enjoy a great first campaign after netting.

In 2023 Cole Palmer netted for Manchester City in their game against Arsenal (a match they would go on to lose on penalties after Leandro Trossard's injury-time equaliser).

He would go on to score 22 Premier League goals and be named young player of the season... for Chelsea, having joined them for £42.5m.

The previous season, Darwin Nunez scored on his Liverpool debut - and Erling Haaland failed to notch on his City bow.

That led to post-match discussion about Nunez looking the better player.

However, Haaland went on to 52 goals that season, with Nunez netting only 15.

Kelechi Iheanacho only scored four Premier League goals after his 2021 Community Shield winner.

But back in 2019 Raheem Sterling's Shield strike for City against former club Liverpool kick-started the most productive season of his career (31 goals).

A version of this article first appeared before the 2025 Community Shield %!s()