A lonely Christmas in Gaza

In Bethlehem, a Christian carpenter sells little nativity cribs with Mary and Joseph carved behind the Israeli wall and the three wise men caught on the other side of the wall, unable to cross over to visit Jesus.

Whoever visits Bethlehem knows perfectly how the Israeli separation wall surrounds Jesus’s birthplace today, cutting it off from nearby communities and restricting Palestinians’ movements.

Twenty-two year old Berlanty Azzam, a Palestinian Christian, will this year be added to the thousands of Palestinians denied entry into Bethlehem, after she was expelled from the West Bank last October.

Azzam, from Gaza, had been studying for a business degree at Bethlehem University for the last four years. Just two months away from her graduation, she went on a short trip to Ramallah for a job interview. On her way back, she was arrested, handcuffed and blindfolded at an Israeli checkpoint, and deported to Gaza.

Her crime, according to an Israeli court that upheld her deportation, was to have lived in the West Bank illegally. Even though she is Palestinian, Gazans are not allowed to live there.

The ban on travel for all Gazans becomes even harder for the 3,000 Christians during Christmas. Separated from Bethlehem by a few kilometres, Jesus’s birthplace has never seemed so distant for them.

For the last three years, since Hamas took over Gaza, all men from Gaza aged under 35 were completely banned from travelling for Christmas. Last year, only 150 were allowed to travel. This year, there has been no news of any permits for Gazans yet.

It’s a hard Christmas this year – Christmas day is just two days before the first anniversary of the 22-day attack by Israeli forces on Gaza. Some of those who were in Bethlehem last year ended up caught out during the war.

“They went to Bethlehem for a few days and ended up caught there for a month; some of them run out of money,” Kamel Ayyad, a public relations officer at the Archbishop’s office by the 1,600 year-old Church of St Porphyry in Gaza City, said. “Some of them came back to find their houses damaged.”

The Christians of Gaza may be the least heard of all Palestinians. Numbering just 3,000, with the overwhelming majority of them belonging to the Orthodox rite (who celebrate Christmas on 7 January), their numbers keep dwindling as they tend to be typically middle class families in search of better opportunities. In 2006, 71 fled to the West Bank after a Christian was killed. Ayyad believes up to 40% of Christians would leave if the border had to open.

Mousa Al Bayouk, 17, from the Christian quarter in Gaza City, is studying to enter university. At his age, it will take him another two decades before he will get a permit to visit Bethlehem. He is not afraid of another war.

“We’re used to the war, what do you want me to be afraid of?”

But he would like to leave Gaza for a future abroad.

“I would like to study abroad, in Greece, to become a mechanical engineer. I wouldn’t want to return,” he says. He then adds, almost apologetically: “If the situation was good I wouldn’t want to leave.”
Shadi Suheil Abu Daoud, a teacher of history at the Christian Latin Patriarch school in Gaza, does not believe Christians will leave Gaza and the West Bank.

“We have always been here, we are Arabs, Palestinians, part of this nation,” he says. “Christians have been part of the Palestinian national movement,” he says, referring among others to the famous leftist founder of the PFLP, George Habash.

“I don’t like it when Palestinians leave our land. This is our country, we have to build our future,” he adds.
At the Christian school where he teaches, only 30 out of 382 children are Christian. Yet the school is also testament to the overall mutual respect that exists between Christians and Muslims in Gaza.

“Here you can find our church just next to a mosque,” Ayyad, who says his best friends are Muslims, says. “We welcome each other in our homes, we eat together. That’s how it has always been. We are all Palestinians, we are all suffering.”

The occasional incidents between the two communities are largely isolated attacks by extremist Islamist groups, or Salafists, which are at odds even with Hamas.

“Some Salafists try to create problems, because they know neither Christianity nor Islam,” Ayyad said.
Reflecting other Christians’ views, Shadi says Hamas brought order and security to the Gaza Strip.
“We feel protected,” he said. “The only problems we had were with some terrorists coming through the tunnels from Egypt who wanted to turn everyone into a Muslim. Their inspiration is Bin Laden and they are a problem even for Hamas here.”

Meanwhile, as pilgrims from around the world flock to Bethlehem and the rest of the Holy Land for Christmas and all year round, Christians in Gaza feel they are forgotten by their brethren.

“People go to visit Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth, but they hardly think of us,” Ayyad said. “All we want from them is to pray for us. We are in Jesus’s land and we are suffering, today.”

“We ask the foreign tourists and pilgrims to demand an end to the occupation, and to pray for us,” Shadi said.

‘We built Israel and all we got was destruction’

Almost a year since his three-storey house in northern Gaza was destroyed, Mohammed Zaid Hader is still living in a tent in the shadow of what remains of his former house, and his outlook is only bound to get grimmer.

It will be the second cold winter that he will have to face with his wife and eight daughters, because like the rest of the owners of more than 3,500 homes that were totally destroyed in Israel’s last offensive, he cannot get the material to rebuild it. For Mohammed and his family, the two-year blockade on Gaza has made daily life miserable, leaving them vulnerable and desperate for the most basic necessities.

As I approach his tent in we pass through makeshift canals dug desperately in the sand on the night when Gaza got its first torrential rain of this winter.

“We were totally flooded, we couldn’t keep up with the water. I kept digging to divert as much water as I could, but it was impossible, he says as he braces himself for worse yet to come.

The sense of hopelessness here, where an entire neighbourhood made up of hundreds of houses was razed to the ground last January, is as overwhelming as the scale of destruction.

For Mohammed, the irony could not be more poignant. As a former builder who used to work in Israel, he worked with Israeli employers on construction sites to build their own properties.

“We built Israel with our Jewish friends, and look at what they did to our houses,” he said. “Why did they have to bomb our houses like this?”

Israel’s two-year blockade since Hamas took over control of Gaza means that none of the essential reconstruction material can come into the strip – from cement and tiles to plastic pipes and glass. Demand in Gaza for window glass alone would cover 30 football fields with glass.

Mohammed is now unemployed. Like thousands of others, he was stopped from working in Israel in response to the 2000 Intifada. This year, he worked for a few months in a smuggling tunnel until it collapsed, leaving him injured and fearing for his life

He told me it took him four years to build his house. The little financial help he received after it was destroyed disappeared quickly to pay old debts. Now he is penniless even if there was material available to rebuild it. Across Gaza more than a hundred other families face the same situation, living in tents that were too hot in summer and are now unfit for the cold winter weather.

As we speak, bulldozers are removing most of the rubble, although Mohammed is still using the remains of his house to shelter a water tank and some poultry. He does not know where he will put them once the area is cleared.

Amid the rubble, Mohammed has collected dozens of tiles that he salvaged and that once used to pave the floors of his house. They may be priceless in Gaza given the total blockade, but he has no house to put them in and no idea when he will have.

Waiting for Shalit ... and a thousand other prisoners

Known for their black humour, Palestinians in Gaza joke openly about Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been in captivity in the besieged strip since June 2006.

Young and old quip they have seen the Israeli sergeant directing traffic at a Gaza junction as a Hamas policeman.

“He’s in my basement,” a young graduate from Gaza City said, recounting how Israelis regularly bombard Gaza with SMSes and leaflets dropped from fighter planes with messages urging Palestinians to give any information about Shalit’s whereabouts for a US$ 2 million reward.

Another one told me that if Hamas were smart they would marry him to a Gazan woman, or maybe to four.

“That way he will have children and we would have much more captives to bargain with,” he said.

Palestinians themselves recognise the absurdity of the situation. Since Shalit was captured in an audacious cross-border raid more than three years ago, he has become a world celebrity, known in the four corners of the world as the young Israeli who was “kidnapped” by Islamist fighters.

Never mind that he was actually captured during a military operation, but the fact that there are thousands of faceless and nameless Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails shows just how unbalanced the whole equation between Israel and Palestinians is.

The last week has seen a total frenzy of conflicting reports about the negotiations between Israel and Hamas that would lead to Shalit’s swap with 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

Many Gazans speak of the period “before Shalit” and “after Shalit”, to contrast the times before and after the blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza. Many people resent the abduction, blaming it for the hardships that ensued, crippling their daily lives.

Mahmoud Abu Hamza, 47 from Jabalya refugee camp, contrasts “the miserable life today” with the time when he worked as a construction worker in Israel, although in reality he and many other Gazans were stopped from working there after the 2000 intifada, years before Hamas took over.

Yet Abu Hamza and many others who do not see eye to eye with Hamas look forward to the prospect of getting 1,000 Palestinians freed from Israeli jails, just as last October the Islamist movement won a great victory through the release of 20 Palestinian women from prison for a mere three minutes of video footage of the same Shalit. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were reminded that Hamas’s approach – that of the armed struggle – in contrast with that of Mahmoud Abbas, was ultimately yielding results.

Indeed, if the swap does happen – with the latest reports suggesting it might happen on Monday – Hamas will come out as the victorious force to be reckoned with. In spite of the blockade and international boycott of this movement labelled as terrorist by the US and the EU, Israel will give the ultimate testimonial that Hamas have to be on the negotiating table, not out in the cold, where they actually got stronger.

Gazans hope the release of Shalit will also bring about the lifting of the crippling blockade – although nothing is given – but by all accounts Hamas will score the greatest points on the Arab street.

The agreement will also have wide political repercussions for Palestinians, especially if jailed Fatah official Marwan Barghouti – currently serving five life sentences for masterminding attacks in Israel – is released.

Many hail Barghouti as the next Palestinian leader, although senior Fatah officials are not particularly fond of him. Nevertheless, Mahmoud Abbas’s decision not to stand for re-election next year will make it much easier for him. Barghouti’s warm relationship with Hamas may also help to thaw relations between the Islamist rulers of Gaza and Fatah.

In any case, Fatah, Israel and the rest of the world will have to come to terms with the fact that despite years of blockade, wars and assassinations of its leaders, the Islamists are not only here to stay, but they are scoring points with their own people.

Gaza facing gas crisis

“In two days’ time, I won’t have any bread to sell,” Abed the baker tells me grimly as he hands me over my dozen pitta breads. “There is no gas at all.”

Like other bakeries before it in the last few days, Al Hasouna Bakery will have to close down if cooking gas remains out of reach in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Restaurants, hospitals and families are already feeling the shortage, most of them having run out of reserves just as the weather got colder. Many fear that while food will be available, families will not be able to cook it for the Muslim holy feast of Eid Al Adha at the end of the month.

The problem started about a month ago when Israeli authorities decided to change the crossing through which they transfer gas and fuel into Gaza.

While the Nahal Oz fuel terminal is tailor-made for gas and fuel transfer, taking 30 minutes to send fuel from one truck to the other side, the Kerem Shalom crossing takes up to three hours to get the same amount transferred.

The latter is situated in the middle of the desert, an hour away from Gaza’s gas depots as opposed to the 20-minute drive to reach Nahal Oz, and has no storage facilities. This means that while fuel in Nahal Oz can be transferred into the six existing containers holding 60,000 litres each, in Kerem Shalom the transfer has to go directly into Palestinian trucks in tricky manoeuvres requiring timely coordination. Israeli authorities justify the use of Kerem Shalom on security grounds.

“Kerem Shalom is not equipped to transfer the amount of gas needed daily in the Gaza Strip,” the head of the Gaza union of gas station owners, Mahmoud Al Shawwa, said. Last Monday, 30 gas stations were closed after only 49 tons of cooking gas entered Gaza, that is 2% of the weekly need.

Over the last two months, gas entering Gaza fell down from 2,500 tons in September to 1,600 in October and a meagre 400 tons until mid November.

According to Al Shawwa, the 1.5 million population of Gaza needs 4,500 tons of gas per month in summer, and 6,000 tons in winter.

The situation is similar to November and December last year, when a serious shortage of cooking gas caused bakeries to shut down in the run up to the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Now, the little gas that makes it through is being kept for bakeries and hospitals, although Abed’s bakery still didn’t get its share last week and hospitals anticipate running out of gas in the next few days. A falafel shop owner using his last gas canister says he will soon have to resort to diesel, which is pumped inside canisters to produce vapour like in the old times.

“Diesel is terrible, it turns my kitchen black, but what can we do?” said Abu Bashir. “We are left with no other option.” The solution however is not available to bakers, whose equipment is made to run on gas.

Some families who have the luxury of a garden or backyard have already shifted to cooking on firewood, like in the old times. Problem is, everything in Gaza is like ‘in the old times’, thanks to the Israeli blockade. Instead of gas-guzzling vans, people in Gaza use donkeys; in the absence of concrete, people are building with mud.

At my flat I keep a kerosene lamp in the living room, not as a rustic decoration, but because I have to light it almost every night during power cuts.

Shqaqi still mobilises thousands in Gaza

From the roof of an abandoned five-storey building behind the massive stage, the view of thousands of Islamic Jihad supporters – around 40,000 – gathered in Khatiba Square in central Gaza City after Friday prayers was impressive.

Fourteen years since the assassination of their founding leader, Fathi Shqaqi, in Malta, this marginal yet fiery Islamist movement is still mobilising the masses in one way or another, vowing revenge on Israel and its annihilation while steadfastly refusing to engage in Palestinian elections and any negotiations for peace.

On the ground, young men covered from their heads in white sheets – the so-called martyrs-in-waiting who would be sent for the next suicide missions – marched over the Israeli flag while hundreds of others wore mock suicide bombers’ vests and carried plastic rockets, and others still burnt the Israeli and American flags.

A masked gunman standing on top of the building, clearly happy to be photographed, posed with his Kalashnikov for the picture.

“Where are you from?” he asked me.

In all my life, that question never seemed as risky as today. Many Palestinians have a vague idea of Malta as a peaceful and lovely island, but for any Jihadist, it is the place where Shqaqi became a “martyr”.

The faceless militant made the connection immediately, but luckily he also seemed convinced Malta was just a victim of what many believe to have been an Israeli Secret Service (Mossad) operation carried clandestinely on its shores.

The bearded doctor from Gaza born to a refugee family had founded the movement in 1979, inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran. He was previously active in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood but left disappointed because of the movement’s belief back then that the Islamic world had to be unified to liberate Palestine.

Opposing secular Arab governments and declaring a holy war on Israel, Shqaqi is believed to be the first Palestinian to justify suicide attacks as part of an armed guerrilla struggle against Israel – distinguishing between prohibited suicide and martyrdom.

Arrested twice by Israel in the 1980s for subversive activities and subsequently deported to Lebanon and then to Syria, Shqaqi secured funding and solidified alliances outside the Palestinian territories with radical Shi’ite movements in Iran, Lebanon’s Hizballah and Damascus, which remain to this day.

In 1994, just a year before he was gunned down in Tas-Sliema, he was a key player in a coalition of factions rejecting Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s signing of the Oslo Accords and the ensuing peace deal with Israel, embarking on a series of suicide attacks on Israeli military and civilian targets. Months before his assassination, Shqaqi’s organisation claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a bus stop near Tel Aviv that killed more than 20 people.

On 26 October 1995, Shqaqi arrived in Malta by ferry from Libya using a fake Libyan passport in the name of Ibrahim Ali Shawesh, after reportedly meeting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Hours after landing, a man accompanied by a driver on a foreign-registered motorcycle – both wearing helmets – stopped him outside the Diplomat Hotel, where Shqaqi had booked a room, and shot him several times from point blank range in front of shocked onlookers and traffic. The hit man and the driver are believed to have escaped from Malta shortly afterwards on a speed boat.

The assassination sparked furious protests outside the Maltese embassy in Tripoli and a dramatic downturn in relations with Libya, which for some months suspended the ferry service with Malta – at the time its only link with the rest of the world.

Carried out under former Police Commissioner George Grech, the murder was never solved. The Maltese government never named anyone, nor did Israel ever comment on the case, but then foreign minister Guido de Marco had said “we would not accept any settling of scores in our country.”

For years after Shqaqi’s assassination, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad carried out several other terrorist attacks with its leadership based in Damascus. The US government lists it as a foreign terrorist organisation committed to suicide bombings against the state of Israel.

Despite their seemingly similar goals, Islamic Jihad is nowadays at loggerheads with Hamas, which currently rules the Gaza Strip. Unlike Hamas, which is far bigger and runs schools, hospitals and social services, Islamic Jihad has no social or political programme and is close to the Shi’ite Iranian regime and Lebanon’s Hizballah movement.

The movement still uses the same fiery rhetoric as its founding father’s, although in the last years it has been unable to carry out attacks in Israel. Yet Friday’s rally showed Shqaqi’s movement is still alive and its intentions remain as militant as when it was founded.

“Death to Israel,” the masses chanted in reply to one of the leaders’ calls from the podium. “Muhammad’s army will be back to wipe off the Jewish state.”

Art under blockade

Dozens of people are flocking to a modest house recently converted into an art studio by a handful of young artists from Gaza. The streets in central Gaza City are dark after the latest power cut, but generators serve to light up the exhibition space, making it possible to see the works of art.

The lights also expose the poor quality of some of the photo prints.

"It's impossible to find good printers in the Gaza Strip," says artist Bassel Al Maqoussi, who had to make do with inferior prints of his works to be able to exhibit them here. "There is no professional equipment to print high quality photos, so we have to manage with what we can."

Under blockade, even art here suffers from the same problems faced by every other sector. Paint and raw material is scarce, of low quality and very expensive.

"We depend on material coming through the tunnels from Egypt," says another artist, Sharif Sarhan. "Sometimes we have to ask anyone coming from Israel or Jerusalem or Ramallah to bring us material with them. I have some friends working with UNRWA, but not everyone is so lucky. No artist here can live on art, so we all have to have another job. There are no materials here, and no good places to hold exhibitions; maybe three spaces in all of Gaza."

Even the de facto Hamas government of Gaza does not help much. The Islamist movement is, at best, indifferent to anything that is not immediately religious or political within its own agenda.

"I have no work or cooperation with the ministry of culture, no contact," says Sarhan, who has participated in numerous exhibitions abroad in the past. "We don’t really have problems with them. Government is not interested in art. Maybe they organise different activities falling under culture, but not art. We’re not on the same wavelength... maybe even seeing women coming for this exhibition won’t please them."

The occasion for tonight's event is meant to mark the opening of an exhibition called 'Tribute to Jerusalem'. Yet in the besieged and impoverished Gaza Strip, an art exhibition is also a statement that the people here are alive and daring to dream.

Organised by Windows from Gaza, a collective of Gazan artists working to promote contemporary modern art, the exhibition pays homage to the holy city that is completely forbidden to Gazans and the vast majority of Palestinians.

Sarhan last visited Jerusalem 16 years ago. What he misses most are the little, ordinary details of life in Jerusalem. Like having tea with friends on a pavement, walking in the labyrinthine cobbled streets, or buying a souvenir.

“We can’t move out of here, definitely not to go to Jerusalem,” Sarhan says. “Our idea behind the exhibition is to say ‘hello, I’m here’ to Jerusalem. It’s our way to tell Jerusalem that it’s still in our hearts, that we’re thinking of it all the time.”

Al Maqoussi last visited Jerusalem in 2007, before the civil war between Fatah and Hamas and the ensuing blockade. But even on that occasion, he could only see the Old City from the outside.

 “I was with my friends at the gates of Jerusalem, at Damascus Gate, and we were prevented from entering by Israeli police, specifically because we are from Gaza,” he says. “I couldn’t even take a photo of the Old City. We could only see Jerusalem from outside the fortress walls.”

Another artist from Gaza exhibiting her works is Maha Daya, whose colourful landscapes with domed buildings and arched doorways give one a glimpse of her dream of Jerusalem. Her last visit to Jerusalem was in 1996, and she is well aware of the ongoing changes happening under Israeli occupation.

"If I had to go there again I’m sure I’d find that a lot has changed. It’s not just the landscape and the buildings, but also the people – there are much fewer Palestinians living there now.”

A peace prize without peace

When Barack Obama was declared the Nobel peace prize winner last week, perhaps nobody could take the news as a joke more than the Palestinians. After decades of hearing words and promises about a peace that never materialised, Palestinians watched the US president getting the world's most prestigious peace award without having accomplished anything to deserve it.

Palestinians have already seen another Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Middle Eastern players with no ensuing peace, but at least when Yasser Arafat, Shimon Perez and Yitzhak Rabin received the prize jointly in 1994, Israel and Palestinians had just signed the Oslo Accords – a source of much criticism from Palestinian intellectuals but also inspiring much needed hope at the time.

Obama got his Nobel just as his grip on the situation in the Middle East was slipping spectacularly, not to mention the hopelessness in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel refuses to commit to a settlement freeze while the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, has been left on his own to fight hopelessly for his survival.

Just as the Nobel prize was being announced, the US administration was pushing Abbas into a corner by forcing him to abandon the UN human rights report on the Gaza war, a move that exposed him to intense rage among his own people and forced him into a full U-turn in a couple of days.

The UN report, which is based on a fact-finding mission headed by the South African Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, documents cases upon cases of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity committed by Israel last January. It also accuses Hamas of war crimes for the thousands of rockets it launched into Israel and calls for International Criminal Court proceedings against individuals on both sides unless Israel and Hamas investigate the accusations thoroughly.

In pressing Abbas not to endorse the Goldstone report, the US administration put him in an impossible position without giving him anything in return. His own people were calling him a traitor, and in Gaza some Palestinians were throwing their shoes at photos of their president during Hamas rallies. In an ironic twist, Hamas has fully endorsed the Goldstone report even if it means that its own fighters might be summoned at The Hague as war criminals. Eventually, Abbas pushed forward the report at the UN Human Rights Council, but the damage was irreversible.

The US administration's stand against the UN report echoes Israel's rhetoric that there can be no peace process as long as Israeli army generals and officers can be charged as war criminals. But failure to pursue justice and accountability for Israel's disproportionate offensive that left up to 1,400 Palestinians dead and thousands of houses demolished will also keep peace as elusive as ever.

Goldstone – respected by human rights movements but much reviled by Israel – accepts Israel's premise for attacking Gaza, but denounces the type and extent of force used by Israel to "defend itself". In other words, Goldstone accepts that one is entitled to attack his neighbour in self-defence, but that does not give one a right to destroy the entire neighbourhood.

In opposing the UN report, Obama, together with all the countries that voted against it, is not only denying Palestinians' right for justice, but he is also weakening Abbas to the point of leaving him utterly powerless, both internally and as a party for peace. Added to that, the Obama administration is also undermining Egypt's attempts at reconciling Hamas and Fatah – itself a Herculean task – by stating that it would not recognise national unity that would pave the way for general and presidential elections, except on its own terms.

A Fatah memo leaked last week spoke of Palestinians' hopes in Obama having "evaporated". Some may think that is premature, just nine months since Obama took office. Hopefully it's as premature as his prize.

Hamas’s PR coup

Hamas is not new to coups, but on 2 October the Islamist Movement staged a bloodless one when for less than three minutes of footage of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit it got 20 female prisoners released from Israeli jails.

Not only was the footage acceptable for Israelis, which found in it all the signals they needed of Shalit’s good health and lucidity, but it scored highest marks on the Arab street as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were reminded that Hamas’s approach – that of the armed struggle – in contrast with that of Mahmoud Abbas, was ultimately yielding results.

It was not just a great PR victory for the de facto government in Gaza, but it did it with a sense of magnanimity too. Only two out of the released 20 prisoners were from Gaza, and Hamas was the least represented among the former detainees. By all accounts, Hamas came out with flying colours as busloads of people swarmed in Gaza and Ramallah to greet their “sisters” while Shalit’s footage was being handed over to Israel.

“These are all our sisters, this is all good,” said Mahmoud Abu Hamza, 47, from Jabalia camp who works as a caretaker in a Gaza City motel and who does not normally see eye to eye with Hamas. “Hopefully this will lead to an agreement on Shalit and to the lifting of the siege.”

Known for their black humour, Gazans have turned the Shalit ordeal into a joke, with the young and old quipping they have seen the Israeli corporal directing traffic at a Gaza junction as a Hamas policemen.

“He’s in my basement,” said Majed Abusalama, a young graduate from Gaza City, recounting how Israelis regularly bombard Gaza with SMSes and leaflets dropped from fighter planes with messages urging Palestinians to give any information about Shalit’s whereabouts for a US$ 2 million reward.

Abu Hamza’s generation speaks of the period “before Shalit” and “after Shalit”, to contrast the times before and after the blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza. Many people resent the abduction, blaming it for the hardships that ensued, crippling their daily lives.

Abu Hamza contrasts “the miserable life today” with the time when he worked as a construction worker in Israel, although in reality he and many other Gazans were stopped from working there after the 2000 intifada, years before Hamas took over.

Hamas’s popularity was dealt a further blow after Israel’s 22-day war on Gaza last winter, when an estimated 1,400 Palestinians were killed and thousands of houses were destroyed in Operation Cast Lead.

“After the war people said there is no resistance,” said Sami Ajrami, an independent political analyst from Gaza.

Today, an estimated 85 per cent of Gazans survive on humanitarian aid. The UN agency helping Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) says abject poverty has tripled this year to 300,000, that is one in five residents out of the estimated 1.5 million in Gaza. UNRWA’s head in Gaza John Ging links poverty directly to the border blockade, calling it a “man-made disaster” and “a predictable consequence”.

A survey carried out in Gaza and the West Bank last April by Birzeit University found Fatah’s popularity rising, with 31 percent of respondents saying they would vote for it against 17 percent favouring Hamas. Significantly, Fatah enjoyed more support in the Gaza Strip than in the West Bank.

But the deal Hamas just struck with Israel, with the mediation of German and Egyptian interlocutors, gave it a great boost of credibility among the people living in the besieged strip.

“The Shalit deal is great for Hamas’s popularity because it shows that there is, effectively, a connection between resistance and political reward,” Ajrami said. “It is an investment because Palestinian elections will arrive after reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas.”

On the day of the prisoners’ release, images of a beaming Ismael Haniye – the deposed Hamas prime minister in Gaza – hit the TV screens and the next day’s front pages.

“We will keep our promise to liberate all the male and female Palestinian prisoners,” he said.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah members could only watch in embarrassing silence as the news unfolded. A Fatah official admitted to Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “the only way to bring the release of prisoners is through force. We have already learned that negotiations with you Israelis do not bring results” – a clear sign of exasperation at Fatah's exclusive resort to largely unfruitful negotiations with Israel and abandonment of armed resistance.

“All Israel wanted was to see that Shalit was OK and to make Hamas feel responsible for his life. Hamas proved that, and in so doing it showed it was in total control of the situation,” Ajrami said.

The deal proved once and for all that Shalit, as is the security situation inside Gaza, is under Hamas’s total control, through its Izzadin Al Qassam military wing. It dispelled any questions there may have been that Hamas was held hostage by any faction, particularly the armed Jaish al Islam (Army of Islam) which was involved in Shalit's capture in the cross-border raid.

Headed by Mumtaz Daghmash, Jaish Al Islam and the Daghmash clan had held Hamas hostage through its series of kidnappings of foreigners, the most famous among them being BBC correspondent Alan Johnston. But ever since Hamas secured Johnston’s release after four months in captivity in July 2007, it has cracked down on all the warring factions, killing most of the Daghmesh clan militants and establishing its own version of law and order across the strip.

“Mumtaz is out of the picture. He’s been out of it since the end of 2007. Jaish is finished,” Ajrami said.

The fact that Hamas fulfilled the Shalit video deal’s requirements sent a signal that it was in control within the strip, as opposed to Abbas’s disintegrating political capital in the West Bank.

Abbas in freefall

Just as Hamas was still savouring its moment, Abbas headed straight into a minefield when news broke out he had deferred to next March the endorsement of Richard Goldstone’s report on the UN Human Rights Council, shortly after he was visited by the US Consul-General.

While Hamas was initially hostile to the Goldstone report (named after the head of the UN Fact Finding Mission which besides accusing Israel of committing possible war crimes in the 22-day assault also blames the militant movement for firing rockets) the leadership was quick to turn Goldstone into a gold mine as Abbas came under fire from all sides. If Shalit was Hamas’s winning card in the last week, Abbas gave it another victory with the unlikely name of Goldstone – a South African Jewish judge with a daughter living in Israel.

By requesting the postponement of the Goldstone report discussion, Abbas sealed his reputation as a “traitor” to his own people – a charge never fired from as many quarters at the beleaguered president at once.

Mahmoud Zahar, the number one Hamas political leader in Gaza, went as far as saying Abbas should be “stripped of his Palestinian citizenship” for this “act of treason” during an emergency meeting of the Gaza Strip’s legislative council last Monday.

But beyond Hamas and the usual opponents, the extent of Abbas’s crisis could be glimpsed from the range of harsh critics from within his own constituency and independent organisations.

The PA’s minister for the economy, Bassem Khoury, reportedly resigned in protest from the Cabinet (he gave a ‘no comment’ when asked after official Palestinian agencies reported the news). Speaking on condition of anonymity, other Fatah members have called for Abbas's resignation.

Reputable human rights organisations teamed up to issue an unequivocal condemnation against the Palestinian Authority leadership.

“This deferral denies the Palestinian peoples’ right to an effective judicial remedy and the equal protection of the law,” a statement signed by 16 Palestinian NGOs said. “It represents the triumph of politics over human rights. It is an insult to all victims and a rejection of their rights.”

The media war against Abbas in Gaza and the West Bank was relentless.

“Right now there is a media war against the Palestinian National Authority,” Ajrami notes. “They can see Abbas getting weaker day after day. He had no justification to throw the Goldstone report out of the window.”

Overwhelmed by accusations from all fronts, including a wave of mass demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza, Abbas on Monday launched an “investigation” into “the circumstances” that led to the postponement of the Goldstone report’s endorsement.

In reality, the circumstances were all too transparent. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear that any endorsement of the Goldstone report would stall any hopes of resuming the peace process, with the Obama administration paraphrasing the veiled threat into stating that peace talks, not finger-pointing, was the priority. The pressure, or “intense diplomacy”, was too much for Abbas. While the US administration denies exerting pressure, Obama administration spokesman Ian Kelly on Monday said: “I think that we recognized that we had serious concerns with the recommendations and some of the allegations (in the Goldstone report). … We appreciate the seriousness with which the Palestinians approach this very, very difficult issue, and we respect this decision to defer discussion of the report to a later date” to remain focused on re-establishing the peace process.

Soon after that round of praise from the US administration, in what could only be described as a U-turn, Abbas’s right hand man and chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, announced Tuesday that the Palestinian president was “seriously considering” taking the Goldstone report directly to the UN Security Council and admitted the original decision was a mistake. The news was immediately followed up by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi through his request to the United Nations Security council to discuss the findings of the report, but the damage for Abbas was irreversible.

By Wednesday, posters of Abbas with his face crossed out amid images of victims of the Gaza war were posted all over Gaza, as Hamas was calling on people to throw their shoes at photos of their president. The caption to the posters read: “Destined for the garbage of history, Mahmoud Abbas”.

“Abbas is paying a high price for his decision on the Goldstone report,” Ajrami said. “He is now trying to cover up for his blunder, but nothing short of a big and quick response from Israel and the Obama administration will get him out of this, in the form of starting peace negotiations and Israel’s recognition of 1968 borders for a Palestinian state. But Israel will remain keen on undermining Abbas.”

Proof of that, Ajrami says, is the timing of another sinister and serious charge that Abbas is blackmailed by Israel – an allegation first touted by Hamas media attributing it to unnamed “sources in Washington”, then picked up by the Israeli press claiming that Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had video or audio evidence exposing the Fatah leadership of complicity in the war on Gaza.

According to the version reported by Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot and in turn picked up and distributed by Hamas media, Lieberman is in possession of tapes in which Tayeb Abd Al Rahim – secretary general of the Palestinian presidency – can be heard in a telephone call with the Israeli Army Chief of Staff during the assault on Gaza, allegedly imploring him to strike at refugee camps.

“This is the time to enter refugee camps in Jabalia and on the beach,” Abd Al Rahim allegedly says in the phone call. “The fall of the two camps will lead to the end of the authority of the Islamic movement in Gaza and force them to raise the white flag.”

According to unnamed sources upon which both the Israeli newspaper and the Hamas media agree, the Army Chief of Staff, Gabi Ahskenazi, replied that “such a step would lead to the demise of a lot of civilian casualties”, to which Ab Al Rahim allegedly replied: “They elected Hamas ... they chose their own destiny, not us”.

Even if that may sound far-fetched, the damage is done and it serves only to consolidate Abbas’s image as “Israel’s best collaborator”, and not just among Palestinian hardliners.

Abbas’s close cooperation with Israeli forces under the leadership of US Lt. General Keith Dayton brings smirks on the faces of many Palestinians. While they acknowledge that the PA’s security forces – funded, trained and armed by the US – have imposed law and order in the West Bank, they also decry what they call “doing the dirty work for the occupation” – a phrase coined by Hamas that is gaining currency in the Palestinian street in the face of arrests, torture and killing of armed militias and fighters who refuse to surrender their arms.

“Ultimately the PA forces in the West Bank are subservient to the higher forces of the occupiers,” said a Palestinian involved in the US training programme for the forces loyal to Abbas. “In exchange, Israel is relaxing on some outposts and minor checkpoints, but whenever the Israeli army launches a raid in the West Bank, it merely informs Palestinian security forces, with the latter standing by the side.”

Just a few days before Abbas’s decision that shocked all Palestinians, Israeli newspapers were reporting of Israel’s request to drop the war crimes suit in exchange for a mobile telephony frequency that would enable a second operator, Wataniya, under heavy investment from the PA, to launch its mobile phone service in the West Bank and Gaza.

“That was not the reason for dropping endorsement to the Goldstone report, but it just made Abbas appear more ridiculous,” Ajrami said.

Reconciliation on paper

The blow to Abbas’s image also comes just days ahead of the date set by Cairo for a final agreement on national reconciliation between Fatah, Hamas and the rest of the factions.

In the ongoing war of words, Hamas is threatening to delay the agreement meeting on 26 October, citing “Abbas’s act of betrayal” in deferring the endorsement of the Goldstone report.

“The people won't have mercy on us if we reconcile with those who failed to protect the nation’s rights,” said Senior Hamas leader Salah Bardawil at a session of the Gaza parliament.

In spite of the incitement, many believe Hamas will still attend the grandiose ceremony being prepared by Egypt for the signing of the official agreement after months of discords. A Hamas insider said the movement will argue its problem is with Abbas, not with Fatah, in justifying its decision.

“Hamas has taken the decision to go to Cairo,” he said. “They will sign it.”

The agreement will pave the way for the formation of an interim unity government until new elections are held, possibly by next March. In turn, Hamas – considered a terrorist movement by the US and the EU – will expect an easing of the blockade that has crippled the entire Gaza Strip.

“Hamas wants to avoid the elections, but it is also aware that at present it has no recognition whatsoever, not from the international community and not even from the Arab countries,” Ajrami said. “So they are trapped and that’s why they will sign the Egypt paper, in the hope of relaxing some of the pressures on Gaza. I doubt the agreement will be implemented, but they will sign it.”

Despite its expected signature on paper, Hamas opposes two main points written on the Cairo paper: letting Abbas’s forces take back control of Gaza, and letting Abbas himself rule the Gaza Strip by stopping the Haniye government.

“They will do anything to prevent that,” Ajrami said.

Should Hamas renege on its agreement and Abbas push forward with his forces, Gaza could easily see a repeat of the 2007 bloody civil war when Hamas routed forces loyal to Abbas and seized the strip.

A third intifada?

As if that were not enough, tensions are also escalating dramatically between Muslims and Israel in Jerusalem. Controlled by Israel since the annexation of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, the old city remains a flash-point between the two sides. For Muslims, it is home to Al Aqsa Mosque – considered the third holiest site in Islam – and Al Haram Al Sharif – the Noble Sanctuary. For Jews, it is home to Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

At the end of September 2000 it was the stage for the second Intifada, also known as the Al Aqsa Intifada, when Ariel Sharon set foot inside Temple Mount sparking the bloody uprisings lasting years and that left an estimated 5,500 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis killed.

The last weeks’ clashes, coinciding to the day with the ninth anniversary of that unholy visit, lifted the lid on the buried tensions that remain. Dozens have been injured in the riots that saw Palestinians clashing with thousands of police deployed in the city, amid exhortations that Israel was planning to “take over Jerusalem and Judaize it.”

During a mass rally organised by Hamas and televised live on its TV station, Al Aqsa channel, one of the Hamas leaders in Gaza called for the resumption of suicide bombings in Israel in response to the clashes.

“I long to see bus ceilings blowing up in the sky,” Mohammad Abu Askar said in his speech, calling on Abbas to free prisoners from Palestinian jails and allow them “to continue bombing buses and restaurants” in Israel.

But it is not just the hardline Islamists who are calling for an uprising. Talk of “the third Intifada” in the offing also came from Fatah and all the other Palestinian factions. Erekat charged Israel with “lighting matches in the hope of sparking a fire, deliberately escalating tensions in occupied East Jerusalem”. Yet Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority are also suffering a deadly blow as they prove they are unable to follow their words with action. Some believe they are not even interested.

“There will not be a third intifada,” Ajrami said. “People in the West Bank are tired and exasperated after years of struggle that led only to worsening conditions. But also because the PNA won’t allow it as it would destroy everything with Obama. No intifada will happen now because even the other Palestinian factions are not interested in a third intifada. They won’t follow words with action. Israel is interested in the third intifada, because it only stands to gain from anything that would stall peace talks.”

Yet the spontaneous nature of the previous intifadas should prompt observers to also look at the peripheries. In the last days, as the secular Palestinian leadership in Ramallah watched helplessly, a charismatic sheikh who heads the northern branch of the Islamist Movement in Israel has been mobilizing opposition in the city. On Tuesday, Israeli police arrested Sheikh Ra’ed Salah after he had called for Muslims to go to Haram Al Sharif to protest and prevent right-wing Jewish groups from entering the site. Although he was released after four hours, a Jerusalem judge banned him from entering the city for a month, but his influence in the street is bound to keep cutting across political movements and mobilizing thousands.

Meanwhile in Gaza, ordinary Palestinians fear that Israel may launch another war on the strip following a recent upswing in rocket fire towards Sderot and the Western Negev. The rockets left no victims, but Israel has already responded with intensive shelling in Jabalia and along the coast. At least seven tunnel workers were killed by Israeli bombings last week in Rafah, and three Islamic Jihad militants believed to be preparing a rocket attack were killed in a targeted attack from an Israeli helicopter.

“Our only hope is that there is a change in the political situation,” said Said Wahid from Zeitoun, father of six-month-old baby Nancy killed in the war after inhaling large amounts of white phosphorus when Israeli troops shelled the border village. “I don’t even want to think of the possibility of another war. We would have nowhere to go.”

Over the last months, Hamas has been reining in on factions shooting Qassam rockets towards Israel after a career launching such assaults itself, but some fringe Salafist movements have still managed to shoot their home-made rockets.

“Hamas is against the rockets but it also wants to show that resistance is good for the people, and that they are still the militant resistance,” Ajrami said. Netanyahu, he believes, will do anything to stall any movement towards the next step demanded by the US – a settlement freeze and negotiations about Jerusalem. “That may also include new military strikes soon on Gaza”.

Be it the third intifada or a new war on Gaza, what is sure is that both sides have their finger on the trigger.

(Published on Russian Newsweek, № 42 (261), 12 - 18 October 2009)

Sanaa's unfinished house

Opening the door to her house, Sanaa El Nahhal warns me there is still a lot of work to be done before it can be called a home. The dust on the unfinished floor, the glassless windows and the bare cement make it immediately clear that the house is still under construction. But in reality it isn’t.

“It would take a few more months’ work to finish, but we can’t find the material to continue,” Sanaa tells me as we walk through room after room left incomplete for years.

Like thousands of other unfinished houses in the Gaza Strip, Sanaa’s was caught in the period when Hamas took over control of the territory in 2007. The ensuing blockade by Israel and Egypt meant that all construction material, including cement, tiles and even glass panes, were banned from entering the strip.

Israel cites “security” reasons to justify the siege in place since the Islamist movement took control of the Gaza Strip.

Yet the siege has made the lives of 1.5 million Palestinians living here miserable, 85 per cent of whom survive on humanitarian aid, and with the number of abject poor tripling since Israel’s war on Gaza last January. Indeed, after the war, the number of houses in need of reconstruction increased by thousands, but none of the works could start as the crippling blockade remains in place.

Sanaa, who has been living in Malta for the last 20 years, was planning to build her own family house in Rafah a few years ago, where the rest of the El Nahhal extended family lives.

Even her brother, Samir, who was in Malta after the war, has an unfinished house nearby, waiting for the moment when tiles, cement and paint are back on the market.

“Right now it’s very hard to find anything, or else it’s very expensive,” he said. He was lucky enough to have finished the ground floor, where he lives with his wife, son and two daughters, but the stairs lead to empty, unfinished rooms.

Their father’s fields on the border with Egypt lie abandoned, an olive grove surviving on its own.

“We used to grow fruit and vegetables and sell them in Israel, and they would even be exported as products of Israel at a high price,” Samir says. “But now we can’t get them out of the strip.”

The price their produce would fetch today in Gaza has gone down to one-tenth of what it was a few years ago, forcing them to abandon agriculture completely.

“My father still comes here to look at the trees and to water them, but there is no work to be done,” Samir said. “I told him if it were up to me, I would have already sold the land, but he insists this is family land and that we have to hold on to it.”

In a nearby field, Sanaa’s cousin Khaled El Nahhal is still growing some tomatoes and marrows, although most of his fields are empty. He also laments the fall in work and shows me damaged greenhouses that cannot be repaired.

Sanaa is now waiting for the Rafah border to open to be able to return to Malta after visiting her family.

“We have been planning to come back here and resettle in Gaza,” she says about her husband and two children living in Malta as we walk away from the area. “But not now.”

Two weeks in Gaza

Walking down the main street of Gaza City this week, I realised how quickly I had adapted to the overwhelming destruction as the new setting for everyday life.

Two weeks since my arrival here, I have begun to appreciate that this is the backdrop to which Palestinians, young and old, in the besieged Gaza Strip have learned to somehow get on with life.

In a place where street names change according to who is giving you directions, the only reliable way to get to your location is to ask for landmarks. Parliament, for example, is the landmark everyone refers to for central Gaza City.

However, there now remains only the skeleton of the once imposing Parliament building after it was bombed by Israeli forces last January. Al Jundi Square – the Square of the Unknown Soldier – just in front of the Parliament, still has the pedestal of the former monument, but there is no soldier above it. Yet ask any taxi driver to drive you to Al Jundi and that is where he will take you.

Nine months since the 22-day assault, none of the reconstruction has started as construction material and equipment remains banned from entering the strip.

That is why you find modern blocks of apartments without windows, others only half-finished, and others belonging to luckier owners who repair tiles and windows with different styles and colours according to what is available.

Generators outside shops and offices are part of the street furniture. The electricity goes out so frequently that mobile generators are just left outside on the pavements to keep business moving. Sometimes you only realise there is no electricity because of the sound of generators.

All desktop computers in offices are equipped with UPS (battery back-ups) just so their users don’t have to restart between every blackout and the starting of the generators.

Watching TV is also a different experience. As spy drones and surveillance planes fly above Gaza’s air space, satellite signals get scrambled giving you pixellated pictures or leaving you without sound for a long stretch of time. No TV movie can be enjoyed in Gaza without these exasperating surprises, which also become normal after a few days.

Gaza is one of the oldest cities in the world, yet there is little evidence today of the different civilisations that have passed through it. Indeed, Gaza is a place of extremes. Resistant to almost every occupier that tried to seize it, the many wars and battles have repeatedly leveled Gaza’s buildings, which then had to be rebuilt from scratch.

People may greet you with open arms, some just happy to have a foreigner to speak to, some glad to have someone to practice their English with, others amused that a non-Arab speaks their language. Like Hamada, the total stranger I stopped in the street to ask where I could buy a top-up card for my mobile. He took me by the hand and accompanied me to the shop, made sure I got the card I wanted, noted down my number and called me later just to check my mobile was working and to say hello.

But people may also greet you with suspicion verging on paranoia. I catch a lot of people staring at me, asking each other who I am and what I am doing in their city as they assume I don’t understand them.

The total blockade has meant that only a handful of foreigners make it into the Gaza Strip, mostly UN workers. In contrast with older generations who used to work in Israel, a whole generation of children is growing up having never met a foreigner, further strengthening the siege mentality. The only Israelis they have seen in their lives are soldiers keen on destroying their homes and killing their parents.

Billboards everywhere rarely show adverts, but the absolute majority of them show pictures of Palestinian “martyrs” carrying machine guns or RPGs; the only role models left for a society that seems to have nothing left to lose. Children beneath them play with their toy guns, mimicking their heroes.

Only last Thursday, the United Nations agency helping Palestinian refugees revealed that the number of Gazans living in “abject poverty” had tripled to 300,000 this year, or one in five residents. The agency’s chief, John Ging, did not mince his words: it was a “man-made crisis”, he said.

But he depicted the extent of the crisis best during a meeting with foreign activists a few days earlier. “If you have no reason to live, you will seek a glorious death,” he said.

That too may risk becoming all too normal in Gaza.

Inside Gaza's tunnels

We are driven through a maze of dimly-lit tents in the dead of night on a bumpy dirt road in Rafah, south of Gaza.

The trip came unexpectedly while accompanied by Ahmed, a top Hamas official and former Qassam Brigades militant after a visit to his boss close to the area.

“Would you like to see the tunnels?” he asked casually as we were driving.

It was, of course, an offer that could not be refused. While everybody knows where the tunnels are here on the border with Egypt, getting inside them is something else altogether.

Bombed regularly by Israel – which argues they are used to smuggle in weapons – the tunnels under Hamas control are the only lifeline for Gazans living in the besieged strip through which all the goods, food and even cars cut into pieces are smuggled for the 1.5 million people caught here.

Egyptian operators at the other end are violently hunted down by the bordering regime, and thousands of Palestinians working inside them risk their lives daily as the tunnels cave in from the bombings and the unstable ground.

As it would soon turn out, being accompanied by a Hamas guy respected in the strip made all the difference to get inside one of the around 2,000 tunnels dug here.

As the van driver and Ahmed accosted workers in one of the tents, an intense negotiation with the owners proved negative – they would not let us in.

We drive further down the road and zig-zag through some other tents until we stop at what looks like a dead end. This time the workers seem more open to the suggestion. Ahmed returns to the van.

“Come, we can go in,” he said. “And it’s OK to take pictures.”

A handful of workers greet us inside the tent. A brand new motorbike smuggled from Egypt is parked at the entrance. To the left lies a mattress where a watchman stays when the tunnel is unused. At the end of the tent, an electric motor is connected to a pulley with a long steel cable on top of a platform of sandbags with a hole in the ground around two-metres wide, just enough for a person to pass through. An intercom phone links the workers operating the pulley with those inside the pit and a generator lies nearby in case of a power cut.

A narrow wooden swing tied to the cable hangs over the hole. The motor is switched on so that the swing is lowered enough for me to sit on it on the side of the platform. Once on it, it is slightly raised again and I am suddenly swinging over a 20-metre deep pit. Upon my signal, I start being slowly winched down, sometimes hitting the sides of the pit until I finally reach the bottom. Even though later I see myself smiling in the photos, my temper keeps swinging between nervousness and the adventurous.

Down inside, I have to crouch to start walking into the tunnel lit by light bulbs. For the first few metres, wooden planks cover the fragile top and sides of the tunnel but as it gets narrower, I can touch the earth which brushes off the wall and which so often buries tunnel workers underneath it.

Plastic pipes along the way are intended to deliver milk and oxygen in cases of collapse, but they are not very reassuring.

Metres above me is the fiercely controlled “no-man’s land” – a corridor of land patrolled by Israeli forces which cuts off the Gaza Strip from the rest of the world.

A dozen or so blue plastic tanks on the floor with their top sides cut open are connected to another cable at the entry into the tunnel. They are used to ferry the goods from the other side. Indeed, all of the Coca Cola cans in Gaza bear the scratches left after being dragged around 800 metres from Egypt.

The air is damp and I am sweating profusely. The tunnel gets even narrower and more claustrophobic as I am forced to crawl on my knees to keep on going until I decide to turn back.

Back on the swing, I shout to the men above to start winching me up again, until I’m back on the ground, I can breathe the fresh air and it feels much safer. The workers kindly offer us tea and we chat for a while as machine gun bursts can be heard from the other side of the border – probably Egyptian forces chasing the tunnel workers’ colleagues.

As we sip our last drop of tea, Ahmed sums it all up in one sentence.

“We work with death to be able to live.”

Fishing in the cesspool

The reeking stench overwhelms you immediately on the sandy Gaza beach, polluted by thousands of litres of untreated sewage dumped into the sea every day since the sewage treatment facilities were destroyed in the January war.

The port greets us with fishing boats completely destroyed in the war and others abandoned on the shore in front of the ruins of boat houses shelled during the Israeli bombings.

We boarded a boat in the port of Gaza with former fishermen who have given up the job they had been doing all their life. The reasons why became clear even before they started telling us their stories.

On the horizon, Israeli gunboats could be seen waiting ominously for any craft that dared approach the two to three-nautical mile limit allowed to Palestinians to fish and sail. Approaching that limit, indeed just setting sail, is a risky venture.

“We have turned this fishing boat into a tourist boat, even though there are no tourists. But we always have hope,” Mohammed told us as we were leaving port.

Mohammed and his colleagues could no longer make a living out of fishing within the permitted zone. Fish worth catching lie in deeper seas, but Palestinian fishermen have seen their fishing zone diminishing from the 12 nautical miles agreed to in the Oslo Accords to six miles after the 2000 intifada, and now to a measly three nautical miles, although Israelis often shoot at whoever goes beyond two miles.

“There is no radio communication between Israelis and Palestinians on the sea; the communication is by shooting,” Mohammed said. “The fishermen are always on their own out here, away from the media and the public, and whenever there is trouble with Israel they are the first ones to bear the brunt.”

His colleague, Said Saidi, a refugee forced out of the harbour town of Jaffa in 1948, had been fishing for 40 years before he had to give up his livelihood and passion.

“My family has always consisted of fishermen who know and love the sea, but it is now impossible,” he said. “There are no fish to be caught in here.”

As we sailed further out we could see the Israeli ports of Ashkelon and Ashdod up north. We suddenly heard warning shots being fired at a fishing boat heading towards the forbidden lines. Nearby, fishermen on board a long line fishing trawler waved at us smiling upon realising we were foreigners, making the victory sign with their hands.

But the view of the Gaza skyline from out there was desolate with the bombarded buildings overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

~~~

Later in the afternoon we met John Ging, the chief of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) whose own headquarters and schools were also mercilessly bombarded by the Israelis last January just when Palestinians were seeking refuge in them.

Articulate as ever, Ging remains composed even when confronted with the most difficult situations. He quotes Martin Luther King’s “prophetic words” and his call for the world to intervene against injustices, as required by the Geneva Convention: “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”.

But his outlook is bleak.

Since the war, there has been no recovery and reconstruction whatsoever, he tells us. The unfulfilled promises and pledges by foreign governments have not only left the Gazans without essential buildings, houses and infrastructure, but they have also prevented the much-needed psychological rehabilitation in a vicious cycle of despair.

“If you have no reason to live, you will seek a glorious death,” he said. “It’s worse now than it ever was before. This is not a prison, this is worse than a prison. Prisons carry the connotation that prisoners should suffer, but why should the Gazans be in prison? Don’t confuse that with the fact that there are some people who should be in prison.”

He insists on the need for decision makers to visit the Gaza Strip to see the results of their policies with their own eyes.

“Seeing is believing; we have to challenge decision makers to come here. You have to get out of your office to come and see the consequences of your decisions. People have to come and have the courage to face the truth. It’s the humanity of the people standing in the rubble after having lost everything. That goes counter to the rhetoric we hear every day. Of course there are violent and extremist elements that have to be tackled effectively, but they are tackled very counter-productively.”

The victims of the Gaza siege are innocent bystanders who have nothing to do with terrorism, he said.

“Israel designated Gaza as a hostile entity after Hamas won the election, so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that breeds violent hostility,” he said. “Half of the Gazan population is made of kids; they didn’t vote for anybody.”

To make his point, Ging cites the London bombings and the way the attacks were treated by the international community. Nobody turned on the Londoners and punished them for the terrorist attacks, nobody said London is a terrorist entity.

Ging steadfastly believes in the rule of law as the only road to justice and human rights, and that means that even Palestinians have to seek the high moral ground.

“If you’re fighting for justice and human rights, you have to fight with them,” he said. “Human rights are the foundation for rebuilding here in every sense. We’re in a self-reinforcing cycle of rhetoric and violence. The dynamic will continue to go in the wrong direction until the siege is lifted. Things are going at an alarmingly fast pace in the wrong direction.”

The 2007 civil war gave a glimpse of this when Palestinians killed Palestinians.

His main concern is the children, a whole generation of Palestinians who will have never seen beyond the besieged strip, never interacted with foreigners or even met Israelis except as enemy soldiers intent on killing and destruction. Their violent behaviour and disrespect to their parents is symptomatic of the desperation they are growing up in, he believes.

UNRWA hosts 200,000 children in its schools across Gaza, but it can’t get the raw materials to rebuild schools, to furnish classes with desks and distribute text books – all items that are banned by Israel.

Equally shocking is the fact that the Arab world contributes nothing to UNRWA.

“In 60 years the Arab league hasn’t paid the salary of one teacher,” he said. "The solution is not beyond our reach, but it is getting out of our reach."

Hamas does not like rap

We were taken to the Commodore Hotel in Gaza City, which I was told was recently bought by Hamas. It’s a luxurious hotel overlooking the beach, but it seems completely empty, with the telltale signs of a dysfunctional situation. My spacious room is only lit by two tiny lamp shades, leaving half of it in the dark. Before I realised there was no other lighting, I asked the porter where the light switch was. He shrugged and smiled. ‘Romance’, he said. The water in the shower was rusty for the first five minutes until it became clearer, but then it tasted like seawater.

At night we were taken to an open-air place called The Gallery, where many young, enthusiastic Palestinians were staging a night of music, rap, break-dance and dabka (traditional Palestinian dance). The people here were clearly trying to live as normal a life as possible. They fused western music with traditional culture brilliantly. A rap band called Palestinian Unit sang for Palestinian unity in the face of “the real enemy” – a reference to the crippling Palestinian infighting that has left them hopelessly divided in front of the occupation.

The electricity supply was cut off several times during the show, leaving the area in pitch darkness, but the people seemed used to it and just waited in their seats until the show resumed to the sound of a generator.

Hamas guards who followed us from the airport were there too. They said they were with us to provide security in the wake of Jund Ansar Allah’s (an extreme radical group which accuses Hamas, believe it or not, of not being Islamic enough) recent outing. But their leader was killed by Hamas together with some 50 armed members during their foundation ceremony in a Rafah mosque, and few believe that this fringe group has posed any threat since then.

During the show, a young Palestinian man who is one of Code Pink’s contact persons was persistently harassed by the Hamas security people. His younger sister, a medical student who refuses to wear the veil, introduced us to the crowd who gave us a round of applause.

While the show was still in progression, one of the Hamas men told her brother that he had taken us to “a whorehouse” and that he had to show us out of there immediately, although by the time we got out the show was almost over anyway.

“They don’t like rap,” he told me resignedly. I was worried for his safety but he seemed used to this kind of intrusion by the Islamists and told me he was not afraid of them. “They do this all the time.”

Back at the hotel, I felt tired by the journey, happy about being in Gaza, but also angry at what the Palestinians are made to go through by the people they elected three years ago.

As I write in my room, I can hear the sound of ammunition shot from Israeli gunboats at Gazans’ fishing vessels in the dead of night. Tomorrow we should be joining some fishermen on their boats.

Welcome to Gaza

I did it, I’m in Gaza, and I still can hardly believe it.

We left Cairo yesterday morning and crossed the Sinai desert to the seaside village of El Arish just outside the village of Rafah, where there is the Egyptian border with Gaza. A multitude of checkpoints along the way manned by the so-called ‘tourist police’ slowed down our pace. Even though we warned our driver to tell the police we were tourists on a trip to the El Arish seaside resort, he did at one point let slip that we were heading to Rafah, which meant we were held for a long time while the armed police made phone calls, checked our passports, asked us to write down what our jobs were and lots of other questions.

The police here do not like it when you tell them you’re heading to Gaza, and there is no other reason to travel to Rafah but to enter Gaza. In many ways, the Egyptians are doing the dirty work for the Israelis by trying to dissuade visitors from reaching the strip, patrolling the vast area for any suspicious movements and clamping down heavily on the smuggling of essential goods through the Rafah-Gaza tunnels which have become the only lifeline for the besieged Gazans.

Luckily we convinced the police we were just tourists who “want to see the Mediterranean”, as one American put it, but what should have been a four-hour trip ended up taking almost seven hours.

In El Arish we stopped at the Sinai Star Hotel situated in the midst of a shopping mall in a rundown street. We arrived shortly before Iftar, which happens exactly at sunset when everyone rushes home to break the Ramadan fast with their family. My friend Ahmed (not his real name), whom I had met in Rafah during the war on Gaza last January, was waiting for me at the hotel to take me to his house for dinner. When he learnt we were 13, he wanted to host all of us at his house but the others had already made arrangements at a seafood restaurant and in any case I wanted to spare him the burden regardless of his insistence.

Ahmed comes from a very poor family. He has relatives in Gaza and feels very much a Palestinian – the border that divided Rafah into an Egyptian side and a Palestinian side ever since the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt could not eradicate the blood ties that bonded these people with their relatives caught in Gaza.

At 23, he is the oldest among his brothers and sisters so he feels responsible for all the family, which includes his wife and lovely 11-month-old daughter, half a dozen step-brothers and sisters, his father, and his mother who is now married to another man.

He spent two and a half years in Zambia working at a bakery and managing a supermarket owned by his uncle, where he made some money – enough to buy a pickup van and set aside some savings that came in useful very quickly when the landlord of his father’s house on a farm kicked them out earlier this year.

Yesterday he took me to the new farm he built, with one house for his father and his father’s children, and another one for himself, surrounded by olive trees. The dwellings are mostly devoid of furniture except for some tables and cushions. The roof is made of steel, making the houses cold in winter and hot in summer, but I could see his pride as he showed me the house he bought with his hard-earned money and a substantial amount of credit he got from friends.

Right now, his main source of income is transporting goods with his van, and the most lucrative business revolves around getting goods to the Rafah-Gaza tunnels. But even though he doesn’t work inside the tunnels themselves, his job has become very dangerous as armed Egyptian soldiers are persecuting tunnel operators and whoever has anything to do with them.

“You know Tom and Jerry? It has become a game of cat and mouse,” he tells me. “The police and the soldiers are arresting anyone whom they suspect is transporting goods to the tunnels, so we do not even go straight to deliver the goods but we zig-zag with our vans from one house to the next, while others stay in the street just to look out for any police who might be following us to alert us.”

He tells me a big tunnel that was used to get cars into the Gaza strip was demolished by Egyptian forces, but there are still some 2,000 tunnels from which everything passes into the strip.

Ahmed himself passed through one of them a few weeks ago. Egyptians are strictly forbidden from entering the strip, but Ahmed wanted to visit a sick elderly woman who had taken care of him and his siblings after their mother left the house.

“I knew she was very sick and I wanted to go to her at all costs,” he said.

The underground walk took him about 30 minutes and he had to pay people to show him the way along the intertwining tunnels that are much like a maze, leading to different tunnel openings.

“It’s impossible to go down there on your own unless you know the underground network really well,” he said about the dangerous descent. “You could easily take a wrong turn and return to Egypt, or you can just get lost and die because of lack of oxygen.”

At some points he could feel the earth was unstable, which besides the direct bombing of tunnels by Israelis is the cause of many fatalities in tunnel collapses. He risked his life merely to see the woman who cared so much for him when he was a child.

We talked late into the night and went for coffee at the Swiss Inn Hotel – a quaint resort by the sea that is like an oasis among the dusty streets and overwhelming desert sand. He asked me to sleep at his house, but I thought it was better to remain with the group given that we would be heading to the border crossing first thing in the morning. Typical of Ahmed, he stopped at a shop selling mobile phones and bought me an Egyptian SIM card just so that I could call him as soon as we left the hotel the next day. Despite my protests and insistence that I pay for it, he vehemently refused to accept my money.

“It costs nothing,” he kept telling me. “Now it will be much cheaper to remain in touch.”

~ ~ ~

After breakfast this morning we headed towards the border crossing. Escorted by the tourist police, we could at least use them to our advantage by making sure we got straight through several checkpoints leading to the border gate. Ahmed got there soon after we arrived, but he had to walk a long way as he was not allowed to enter with his van. Soon, however, police who saw him talking to us approached him and asked him to leave – they would not allow him to talk to strangers despite my protestations that he was my friend. After an emotional embrace, he headed back to El Arish, but only after insisting that I tell him immediately if any problems arise.

Trucks, buses and people carrying heavy luggage were already waiting for their turn to be allowed into Gaza. We presented our passports together with signed papers in which we stated that we were aware of the risks of entering the Gaza strip and that no consular services would be available for us in cases of emergency. As time went by it became clear this would be a long wait at the border. We could see busloads of Palestinians, ambulances and trucks going in while we were kept waiting at the gates. Officials from the foreign ministry in Cairo were telling us we were allowed to go in, but the border guards kept insisting they had to clarify some details, delaying our entry for hours under the scorching sun.

Despite the reassurances from the group organisers, I was skeptical about making it through. Any reason, any excuse would do to stop me from entering – I have yet to meet a border guard you can reason things out with. I’ve waited here last January during the war together with hundreds of Palestinians and journalists trying to enter Gaza, in vain. I knew that handing over the passport meant nothing until the gate is opened for you to step inside, and even then it was yet another long wait full of repeat questions. I have also learned that when you are told to wait for five minutes it could mean five hours, which is precisely what happened to us today.

Every now and then, an officer would return to us and ask us the same questions again: when did we arrive in Cairo, where did we stay, in which hotel did we stay in El Arish, what is our employment, why are we entering Gaza... by the end of it we knew each others’ jobs and personal details by heart – some real, some fictitious. I was no longer a journalist but a student, which is also true. An American lawyer decided to become a judge, and a British Home Office anti-terrorist officer became a government secretary.

At one point we could see a truck full of African immigrants under the watch of armed soldiers being rushed out of the area. Thousands of them, mostly from Darfur, cross the desert in their bid to enter Israel. Even here, Egyptian border patrols do the policing for the Israelis, killing many of them on the way and arresting others who will never get a chance to seek refugee status even though they are potentially fleeing persecution.

When, at last, the senior border police officer told us to board the bus to get through the gate, I was still holding back any signs of jubilation despite my colleagues’ euphoria. This was only the first step. I told myself and the others I would not believe I would get through until I heard and saw the last gate closing behind us.

Indeed, once ushered inside the terminal, we had to hand in our passports again to be stamped and processed, and unload our entire luggage from the bus, including boxes of tea for distribution (which, we were told, is in short supply right now), toys for children, pencils, drawing books, crayons, and children’s clothes.

“If only we could get children to smile in the midst of all the suffering they are going through, that would be enough for us,” said Tighe Berry, one of the leaders of the group from the US.

As we waited, we could see hundreds of Palestinians carrying all sorts of things that you would never expect to see being carried through passenger terminals: cookers, fridges, televisions, furniture, kitchen utensils, carpets and even marble slabs. One family we ended up talking to had come from the US to celebrate Aid (the end of Ramadan) with their relatives. They told me they hadn’t slept at all for two days.

Finally we were handed back our passports and told we could proceed to another bus that would take us to the Palestinian side. Again, I would not believe we would make it through until we actually got there. Yet passing through the corridor that is no man’s land and seeing a big ‘Welcome to Gaza’ in front of us made me finally relax. Just at that moment, my girlfriend sent me an SMS: “Tell me when to celebrate,” she wrote.
“Now!” I replied.

Once again, we had to unload the luggage and present our passports to the Hamas border police. This time round it was not as long as before, although some activists who entered Gaza on previous trips said they noticed new procedures, including having to fill in an entry card and pass through customs control. One Italian in our group – the only one who was asked to open his luggage – was carrying two bottles of vodka for a friend of his who has been living here for two years. To his dismay, they were confiscated. Despite requests from friends of mine living in Gaza (and my own love of beer), I stopped short of bringing in any alcohol as I did not want to provide Hamas with any pretext they could use to send me back.

Back on track to Gaza

I am now in Cairo after a long-drawn trip that exhausted me completely. I was here last July to try travel to Gaza via its border with Egypt, but as the Egyptian border remained indefinitely closed I was soon left with no choice but to return to Ramallah. This time round, however, it seems the chances of getting into Gaza from Egypt are better since I will be doing it with an American organisation called Code Pink which has sent members to Gaza in the past.

Last night I slept like a rock at the bottom of the ocean. The first part of the journey is getting to Israel’s Ben Gurion airport from Ramallah. The driver was this really affable guy with whom I spent almost an hour chatting. He picked me up at 7am (Palestinian time) and took me to the airport via a lovely road from a checkpoint at Ain Arik instead of Qalandya, and the views were just beautiful – hills, green fields, small villages. The streets were still wet from a brief shower earlier. I had been through this road before because it's on the way to the village Bil'in but never to cross through the checkpoint because it's far from Jerusalem. The settlements along the way are built on the most beautiful vantage points in the country, standing in dark contrast to everything else.

The driver, Iyad, 36, is from Jerusalem, which today is on the Israeli side of the border. He has a daughter aged six and a son aged three. They are Catholics whose family was driven out of another village and settled in Jerusalem. He tells me business for him and his brother is good. They specialise in transporting people and their luggage from the West Bank to the airport for $100. Their service is sought by hotels (I got to know him through the Royal Court Suites Hotel in Ramallah) and embassies. But his real trump card is his impeccable Hebrew, which meant that at this Ain Arik checkpoint and at the airport checkpoint his "good morning" in Hebrew made the soldiers give him a semi-friendly nod to go ahead and keep driving. A real contrast to what I've seen with countless other Palestinians who are searched and shouted at and generally humiliated.

Yet Iyad is not spared the humiliation that comes with the occupation. In the 2000 intifada, he tells me, he was taken out of his car by an Israeli soldier and dragged to an isolated patch of woods.
"They put my head to the ground and pointed a machine gun to my temple. And he told me to start singing about Muhammad and some such stuff. I refused. I asked him why he was doing that to me, but he got angrier... I was expecting him to shoot me at any time."
He has suffered from diabetes ever since.

He tells me about his daughter who has just started her scholastic year. She cried on her first days, he tells me smiling, but now she has become used to seeing her mother leave her at the gates of school to join her new class mates.

He prefers Ramallah (in the West Bank) to Jerusalem (now annexed by Israel), and he has a house there too, but he can't live in the West Bank. If he does, he risks losing his Israeli ID and that would strip him of all privileges which include being able to drive to and from Israel - his sole source of income.

He tells me he learnt Hebrew at school and perfected it when he worked as a builder with Isrealis. Ingeniously, he puts an Israeli newspaper between the van's dashboard and the windscreen so that soldiers and Israeli police just assume he's Israeli. The van has no tell-tale signs that would normally give away instantly a Palestinian driver, just a modest car key chain with a cross (he's Christian after all) which only a front-seat passenger can see.

He leaves me at the Ben Gurion airport terminal wishing me a safe trip. I go in, anxious at the prospect of facing the notorious airport security who grill anyone who displays any hint of relations with Palestinians. A young woman and then her supervisor did ask me questions for about half an hour, but it wasn't as bad as on previous occasions.

"You stayed here for more than a month? Why did it take you so long to see Israel... you can walk from one side to the other in two days," the security officer told me. But at least he was smiling. I told him I was in Israel on holiday and work (which is true – I simply omitted that my job was based in the West Bank). My answers must have been convincing because they spared me the usual repeat questions. They didn't even take notes (they usually take down notes and compare them to cross-check your answers). Then I was told to proceed to a luggage scan and to open my luggage for inspection, when the official there informed me that the Cairo flight by Air Sinai (Egyptair subsidiary) was cancelled. So we had two options - either travel to Amman in Jordan and take a flight to Cairo from there in the evening, or wait for an El Al flight at 1am.

I didn't want to fly El Al. The interrogations they put you through before boarding are a nightmare. I had had enough of Israeli abuse at checkpoints and airport interrogations. So I decided to go to Amman - daunting as that was.

We were a big group of stranded passengers on this coach - some 50 elderly Americans travelling on this 'Grand Circle Travel' tour (that name sounds so American doesn't it?). I must have been the youngest one on that coach. It took us two hours from Tel Aviv to the Sheikh Hussein Bridge. At least another hour at the border, when we were made to get out of the coach, go through passport control (no questions here, for a change), get our coach checked for bombs, and board another bus that would take us through the bridge into the Jordanian side (a two-minute drive on the bridge over the Jordanian river for which the driver charged us $2), where we would get our passports stamped again.

Both terminals were modern and decent with air condition, but at the Jordanian side the process was so slow that it seemed never-ending. The officer processed all the American passports first, which meant that I was the last one to get out – two Jordanians were mysteriously turned back and not allowed to proceed. I couldn't grasp the exact reasons but apparently there needed to be some kind of coordination between Israel and Jordan for Jordanian travellers - which if true is quite incredible.

The Jordanian officers, even the uniformed ones, do not carry weapons here, which is quite a relief for the eye. As I waited for my passport to be processed I got to know some of the American travellers. I was quite amazed that a lot of them knew about Malta. One was telling me about his dismay at what Israelis were doing to Palestinians.
"They forgot what they suffered 70 years ago," he tells me.

After the long wait for my passport, I'm left with the two Jordanians who are sent back. All the rest of the passengers have passed through customs and are boarding the coach. I panic at the prospect of being left alone at the border, though I manage to pass through just in time. I beg the customs officer in Arabic to please let me pass as he asks me to open my luggage for inspection.

"It's only clothes," I tell him, to which he smiles and tell me to pass through. He then grabs a Koran and starts praying. As I reach the coach, the people start applauding, happy I had finally made it too.
The driver from the border to Amman (Queen Alia Airport) took almost three hours. The hills along the way are impressive, with bare dwellings surrounding them. Images of King Abdullah, his father, his wife and his children are all over the place on billboards, posters and official photos – telltale signs of every regime, but at least they're all good-looking, particularly her Majesty, for whom the airport is named.

We are told to wait at the main departures hall as the officials were breaking their fast, since we arrived just as the imams all over the Muslim world call for Iftar. It was about 7pm. We considered ourselves lucky to have made it - the flight to Cairo was at 8.30pm. After about half an hour we were called in to have our passports checked again and we boarded the plane on a flight that took around an hour and 20 minutes.

By the end of it I was exhausted. Now I know what it means for Palestinians who are only allowed to leave the West Bank through Jordan (as opposed to foreigners who can travel through Israel), although in their case it's even worse because they have to pass through the Allenby Bridge where facilities (and Israeli officers) are totally different, and where hundreds of travellers have to wait long hours in the sun to be allowed to pass.
"We have a built-in programme in our minds that whenever we travel we have to skip a day in our life," a friend of mine from Gaza told me.

Now I'm in Alexandria. I slept deeply through the night and I'm still recovering. Tomorrow I should be meeting the other members of the delegation who are attempting to travel to Gaza with Code Pink. It's going to be a long journey – to me it has become like a quest, having been denied entry into Gaza for so long... I need to rest a bit more.