Every morning, Mansour Mohammad Bakr sets out from the small rented room in Gaza City he shares with his pregnant wife and two very young daughters. The 23-year-old walks past the port and the breaking waves of the Mediterranean where he once earned his living.

Before the two-year war that devastated Gaza, Bakr was a fisher, sharing tackle and a boat with his father and brothers. Now his brothers are dead, his father is too old, and his equipment was destroyed during the conflict. Like hundreds of thousands of others across Gaza, Bakr needs a job.

“Money is the main means of survival in Gaza … without it, a person cannot do anything,” he says. “The limited aid that reaches us doesn’t replace our need for money in any way and doesn’t cover even the most basic living requirements.”

Humanitarian organisations have ramped up distribution since October, when a ceasefire agreement came into effect, leading Israel to lift some of the heavy restrictions it had imposed on aid and easing its delivery within Gaza.

In January, United Nations agencies and their partners reached approximately 1.6 million people with household-level general food assistance. World Central Kitchen, an NGO, is now serving 1 million hot meals a day. But such assistance remains vastly insufficient and still covers only basic necessities. For everything else, brought in by the private sector, Palestinians in Gaza need cash.

Aid workers in Gaza say more fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, clothes and household items are now available, but at exorbitant prices. “There has been a huge increase in commercial supplies … but it is all very expensive,” says Kate Charlton, a Médecins Sans Frontières medical coordinator in Gaza City.

Mohammed al-Far, a 55-year-old former trader who lives with his family in al-Mawasi, a coastal area crowded with tent encampments for the displaced, says they receive only one meal a day from aid organisations.

“It’s either rice, lentils or beans, and once or twice a week, some meat. Life requires cash to go on. We can get enough to eat … but transportation, haircuts, charging mobile phones and buying vegetables and fruit all require money,” he says.

Al-Far has tried to launch falafel and sweets businesses, but without success, and has run up substantial debts. His age now makes it harder to find work.

“My health is still good, and I’m ready to do anything, but employers are looking for younger workers. I have been searching for months and months … I walk around the market looking for work, but without success,” he says.

The problem for al-Far and Bakr, as for all the others seeking work in Gaza, is that there is virtually none. The official unemployment rate, estimated by the UN, is 80% and the economy has shrunk to 13% of its former size.

In November, Pedro Manuel Moreno, the deputy secretary general of the UN’s trade and development agency, said the war had “wiped out decades of progress”. “Gaza is going through the fastest and most damaging economic collapse ever recorded,” he said.

The UN agency’s data shows that in 2024, GDP per capita in Gaza fell to just $161 (£118) a year – among the lowest in the world. The Israeli offensive shattered sanitation, transport, power and health systems, ruined fields and greenhouses and decimated Gaza’s fishing industry, which once employed thousands.

Bakr says: “I dream of returning to the sea and to the profession of fishing, and of being able one day to buy a fishing boat like the one I used to own, so I can provide my family with food, drink, clothing and medicine.”

The October ceasefire agreement was supposed to lead swiftly to reconstruction but progress has largely stalled. Some elements of the agreement have advanced, including the return of all hostages and limited reopening of the Rafah border crossing. Plans for an international stabilisation force are also emerging, with Indonesia saying it is preparing thousands of troops for humanitarian and reconstruction roles.

But Hamas, which controls most of the coastal area where almost all of the 2.3 million-strong population of Gaza now live, is reluctant to fully disarm and Israel appears unwilling to relinquish its control over more than half of the territory.

Israel has blocked the new technocratic administration that was to govern Gaza under Donald Trump’s “peace plan” from entering, while key crossing points remain shut or subject to restrictions.

Even if Bakr could somehow find and equip a new boat, limits imposed by Israel at sea would prevent him from practising his trade.

“My work as a fisher in the sea of Gaza was passed down to us from our grandfathers. I left school young and fishing is all I’ve ever done. I have been searching for work … everywhere I can,” he says.

Even those with advanced qualifications struggle amid the ruins and rubble. Bisan Mohammad graduated with a degree in medical laboratory sciences just months before the war in Gaza was triggered by a Hamas raid into Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and led to 250 being taken hostage by the militant Islamist organisation.

Her husband, a security guard, was killed in the early days of the war, leaving her alone to provide for their daughter. She now lives in a tent with her parents in Nuseirat, in central Gaza.

“I began looking for any available job but without success … everything needs money; even water, food and bedding all require cash. Sometimes I feel that even breathing needs money,” says Mohammad, 23.

Violence has continued since the ceasefire and Israel launched more attacks in Gaza in January than in any month since October, according to Acled, an independent US-based conflict monitor. Gaza health authorities say 586 Palestinians have been killed since the truce took effect, bringing the war’s overall death toll to more than 72,000, mostly civilians.

“What is being called a ‘ceasefire’ hasn’t changed our reality; in fact, it has made it worse,” says Mohammad. “The media has stopped talking about the ongoing killing … while the bombardment continues … prices keep rising, and even basic necessities, when available, such as water and food, are barely sufficient.

“I don’t think about the future and I don’t try to; thinking about it is exhausting and frightening, and the future is unclear. I don’t know what will happen to me or my daughter if this situation continues without work or income.”

Retirees making up some of the nearly 3,000 people arrested for supporting Palestine Action since the organisation was proscribed have said they feel “vindicated” by the high court’s decision to overturn the ban this week.

However, uncertainty remains over whether their trials under terror laws may still go ahead after the government revealed it plans to appeal against the judgment made on Friday by three of the UK’s most senior judges.

A former army colonel and ex-military attache, Chris Romberg, who was yet to enter a plea after his Palestine Action arrest last August, said he was “pleased and satisfied that this proscription, which we knew was illegitimate, has now been shown to be unlawful as well”.

Since July last year, police have arrested at least 2,787 people across the UK for holding signs displaying statements such as “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”, according to the civil liberties organisation Defend Our Juries.

In a written judgment, Dame Victoria Sharp, president of the king’s bench division, ruled the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful on two grounds: breaching human rights laws and the home secretary’s own proscription policy requiring the government to take into account the genuine threat to the UK posed by the group.

While the ban was overturned by the court in principle, Sharp said she would hear from both sides before issuing an order to remove the proscription while the appeal process was in place.

The Metropolitan police said on Friday that, as a result of the decision, officers would cease arresting people expressing support for the organisation, but would continue to gather evidence at protests.

Trisha Fine, who was arrested in Cardiff and spent 27 hours in police custody – during which officers failed to tell her husband what had happened to her – described the ruling as “good news, but with big reservations”.

“Quite a lot of friends have got in touch to say: ‘Yay, aren’t you lucky it’s all over?’ It bloody isn’t. It seems like our jolly government has got all the cards in their hands.”

Richard Whitmore-Jones, who was arrested on 9 August last year at a silent vigil in Parliament Square, said celebration had given way to caution. “Obviously yesterday was such a good day, we were all ecstatic that the prescription ban was overturned, but I think today I’m feeling a little bit more circumspect about what might happen in future with the appeal.”

Father John McGowan, a Catholic priest arrested at the same protest, said he “would have been really upset had the judgment gone against us”. “So yes I’m pleased, I’m very pleased,” he said.

He was, however, “angry at the government, and even angrier now that they should want to appeal”.

“They do not seem to understand the anger of probably the majority of British people at them for supporting Israel. If they want to know the reason why they’re unpopular, this is one of them. Their unconditional support for Israel,” said McGowan, who lived in Jerusalem for five years.

For McGowan, it was clear the government was “on the wrong side of history” and he said “it just struck me how out of touch the government is with the people in this country”.

Romberg, a member of Holocaust Survivors and Descendants against the Gaza Genocide, said he thought the Palestine Action ban had come about due to “the type of political class we have now, which doesn’t seem to believe in anything”.

“We have a government that seems to have given up on its values, on its liberties, on rights, happy to turn on its own people, and even to lie, and it hasn’t worked for them,” he said. “It may go to the supreme court, but whatever happens, this has been a big blow for the government because their credibility, I think, is completely shot.”

He was pleased that “lots of talk about secret evidence that would definitely prove that [Palestine Action] should be banned as a terrorist organisation hasn’t convinced the judges”.

Whitmore-Jones lamented the saga’s cost to the public purse, money which he thought could be put to better use. “It’s clearly just a disgraceful waste of money to keep arresting people for this and putting them in prison and holding people on remand for excessive periods,” he said. “It’s just unconstitutional and disgraceful.”

All those with outstanding charges or an open police investigation remain in limbo while the appeals process takes place. It is not clear yet whether they may still have to stand trial on terror charges.

Whitmore-Jones, who was arrested six times and has so far pleaded not guilty to the first of the charges, joked that he still had “a number of bad-boy appointments at magistrates courts”. On Friday, he received a summons to a plea hearing through the post while he was away celebrating the high court’s decision outside the Royal Courts of Justice.

All the arrestees the Guardian spoke to said they would repeat their actions, apart from Fine, who said: “I’m not sure that I would.

“I want to get my life back. I’ve had enough,” added Fine, who was denied antibiotics she needed for a serious gum infection while in custody, and was subjected to a travel ban which made it difficult to go away with her husband who was recovering from cancer treatment.

“I’d do it all over again, no question,” said McGowan. Whitmore-Jones echoed the sentiment adding, “in a heartbeat”.

McGowan added: “And if I have to go to prison, I would do so. I could justify it to my conscience. It isn’t an easy thing to do, to break the law, to get arrested, but I’d be willing to do it over again. It’s just an inconvenience to me, compared to what people are going through in Gaza.”

They all also spoke about their frustration that while all this was going on, Israel continued to kill Palestinians in large numbers as part of a continuing genocide. Whitmore-Jones said: “I’m concerned that all this fiddling around with the law doesn’t prevent civilians being killed in Palestine.”

He added: “At least one child is being murdered every day in Gaza. I think yesterday there were 30 or 40 people killed. People are dying from cold, lack of medicine, and they’re being killed by munitions. And our country is supporting it. I’m just horrified.

“I’ve just been talking to my grandchildren and I came out with this rather trashy quote that bad things happen when good people stand around and allow it to happen. And that’s exactly the situation that we’re in.”