One of thousands of public servants in Gaza's Hamas-run government, Karim, a Public Works Ministry employee, received what seemed like an ordinary message on his phone: An invitation "for a coffee."
The text gave a time for a meeting near a school sheltering displaced people amid the wreckage and rubble of nearly two years of war between Hamas and Israel in the Palestinian territory.
Karim, who like others asked to use a pseudonym, explained how he went to the meeting in July terrified of a possible Israeli attack, but found "an employee I knew waiting for me."
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