ON October 31, 2023, Ahmed Bashbash lost a second sibling to Israel.
Ibrahim, a Turkish citizen, after having left Gaza in 2008, had returned to the strip for what was supposed to be a short visit to help out their sister Munira. He never left.
“He was drinking tea on the balcony, and they just bombed an entire square,” Ahmed said. “I know it in Arabic, what it's called, but it’s like a multiple airstrike in a specific area. That’s what they do.
“And those bombs murdered around 25 people. Between them, my brother.”
It was not the first time Ahmed had lost a loved one; he holds Israel responsible for the death of his sister Basma in 2020. She had fallen ill in Gaza, and needed to be transferred to a hospital in Jerusalem in order to receive the appropriate treatment. But the Israeli authorities did not grant permission for the transfer for more than a month.
“My father did everything he could, but they didn't let her go,” Ahmed said. When the papers finally arrived, it was too late. Basma died in the ambulance on her way to the hospital."
“I couldn't handle it in the beginning,” Ahmed said, adding that – as with the death of other loved ones, which has become all too common for people in Gaza – the family had tried to do charitable works in Basma’s honour after her passing.
Then, after Ibrahim’s death, Ahmed said he was “lost”.
“I started to think about a way to do some charity work for him too.” And then came inspiration.
On one trip to the supermarket, Ahmed said he got to thinking about how he could be sure to be avoiding Israeli goods – or goods from firms connected with Israel.
“I looked into a few products and I started to think like, ‘oh, is this product on the boycott list or not? Should I start googling them? Should I start searching, do this and this?’
“And then I got the idea: I really wish there was a way just to scan the barcode and [it’s] done. Here is the answer. Is it in the boycott or not? So that was the core of the idea.”
Two weeks later, Ahmed had created the first version of his app No Thanks, which allows users to scan products’ barcodes to learn if the company has links to Israel.
Less than two years on, it now has more than 11.5 million users. But the success came with drawbacks in his own life.
Living in Budapest after moving to Hungary on a scholarship in 2018, Ahmed – who is now 26 – was undertaking an internship at a major tech firm when he was called into a meeting.
“They told me: ‘Sorry, No Thanks made a lot of noise and we’ll have to cancel the contract immediately’.
“They even told me that the CEO of [the firm] had a meeting with the CEO of [another major firm] and they both actually had talked about me,” he added.
The Israeli boycott movement has proven controversial internationally, with anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) laws in countries such as Germany and the US.
Ahmed questioned how supposedly free-market societies could try to prevent people from making free choices with their custom – and raised concerns that any business operating out of Israel would pay taxes that go “to the IDF and supporting killing innocent people”.
“We are now fighting ideology,” he said. “They want to kill all of the Palestinians, and we are trying to stop that.
“I say it loud and clear, it is a genocide. It is a massacre, a huge massacre happening in Gaza.
“And after that, these countries are coming to blame me for just making an app.”
Amid all the peace talks and international deals, one question remains: where is Gaza in all of this? Don’t the people of Gaza deserve peace after more than 600 days of genocide? Don’t they deserve even the most basic human rights? If world leaders won’t act, then we – as…
— Ahmed Bashbash (@AhmedBashbash) June 24, 2025
“The boycotts should be our new lifestyle,” Ahmed went on. “We should stop supporting the people who are actually just looking for wars, looking for destruction, looking for displacing people.
“And if these companies and brands, whoever, don't actually come to our requirement, then we are simply not going to be your customer. That's it.”
The runaway success of the app – 11.5 million downloads is twice the population of Palestine, Ahmed notes – has seen a steady income brought in. However, all of it goes on either supporting the servers required for the app to run, or supporting people in [[Gaza]] directly.
But with Israel controlling the flow of goods into the strip, it is getting more and more difficult.
“Prices right now in Gaza, inflation will be an easy word for it,” he said. “A bag of flour will cost you $600 to $700, just for a bag.
“If I wanted to compare it to last year, when I used to buy tents for people … in a week, we used to give 10 to 20 tents. Now, I cannot afford one tent in an entire week. It's too expensive in Gaza right now.”
Ahmed still has family in Gaza; though his sister Munira managed to escape to Egypt, his brother Hussian remains. But when he has contact with his brother, Ahmed no longer recognises where they grew up.
“It is now all sand or rubble,” Ahmed said of his birthplace in Gaza City. “When he [Hussian] sent me a picture, I couldn't actually recognise which area it was – even though I lived there for 19 years.
“I actually played on the street every day, every single day till I couldn't see the ball anymore – we didn't have electricity there, so we used to play in the light of the sun.
“When you see it now, you don't see a place of humanity. You see just a bunch of rubble from a zombie movie or something.”
The app is developed by Ahmed’s software firm BashSquare – which he explained came from a quip on his name.
“Bashbash. That's my family name actually,” he said. “It's kind of a joke that my name is Ahmed Bashbash.
“My math teacher in 9th grade used to make fun of me and call me BashSquared – in Arabic, of course.
“He was my best teacher, so I actually took this nickname that he gave me. In Arabic, Bashbash comes from the word called bashasha, which is the smile.”
That smile remains on Ahmed’s face, enduring through the shadows of airstrikes, exile, and loss.
You can download the No Thanks app for Android and iOS on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.
