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.