In Gaza

“She wants to photograph everything,” the young man was saying in Arabic to his friend. True, I was at the window, camera ready. But it’s never possible to catch those quickly-passing moments: like yesterday, the two teens on a bike, one riding, one side-saddle between the driver and the handlebars, but grinning widely. Or the boy hitching his donkey to the cart and navigating it from house-side into the busy traffic near Saha district. 10 years old? Or the kid dancing wedding-style: arms up, hips shaking as he slink-dances down his house stairs. Maybe 5 years old? Or the hoard of kids playing on a mound of sand [blurry, but caught it!] post continues

The shades of orange and red of freshly harvested dates stopped me in my tracks. Two horse carts waited streetside, one loaded with heaps of dates still attached to their branches, the second with boxes of crisp, red, newly plucked dates and sweet, dark, time-ripened dates. post continues

I expected to be depressed today. Hamza‘s work had not panned out, my one hope that something good could happen in a Strip under siege…I knew when I returned to the Al Bateran families their problems would be just as massive as before, worse even with time. I knew Saud would not have found the meds he needs to ward of behaviour problems from his schizophrenia, and Fathiya would be admirably by his side but suffering from his moods swings and their biting poverty. post continues

The other day I re-visited the family of martyred Mohammed al Attar, killed while net-fishing off the shores of Sudaniya, northern Gaza. They are poor, desperately-so, and have a string of martyrs in their family, including Mohammed’s mother and one brother.

I’d wanted to see them again and found the time a couple of days ago. I’d wondered how this Ramadan and ‘Eid were for them, with another martyr in their thoughts, and one less source of income for their extended family. But I didn’t need to ask, for it was fairly obvious: there was no celebration, no happiness. They were plodding on, surviving, living to die. post continues

The third day of Eid, kids are still in their new clothes, playing in the streets on makeshift swings or simplified, hand-powered fair-ground rides.

But there are also the extremely poor who aren’t taking the day off, instead profiting from holiday waste to scour the trash bins for recyclables. One such donkey and cart is slugging uphill as I walk behind. It stops and the two youths driving it hop off to poke through the bin, moving on to the next bin a couple hundred metres on.

As I pass, we smile. Despite what might seem a job and lifestyle to blush from, the youths say the day is going well when I ask about their work. post continues

“I had a chicken farm with 3,000 chickens. On the 300 dunams [1 dunam is 1000 square metres] of land I share with neighbours I had 300 olive trees, 130 dates, 200 lemons, 150 papayas, 500 guavas, 200 clementines. I had 50 dunams of wheat and another 50 of peas.

This was all destroyed, all but about 400 chickens. Destroyed before Israel even waged it’s 23 day massacre of Gaza in winter 2008/2009. The last of the chickens died in that attack.

My radish crops, which I’d planted where trees once stood, I had to plow under because they were poisoned by the phosphorous which rained down here.”

Down in Al Faraheen, the farming village east of Khan Younis, a visiting delegation wants to see life in the ‘buffer zone‘. post continues

The streets are completely renewed with energy, filled with life and people no longer fasting. The sense of vitality, exuberance, is strangely similar to that of immediately post-massacre.

[That day, 19 January, the streets blossomed with throngs of people who'd been cooped up in homes, feeling death was imminent. The realization that the mass-Israeli-bombing (but not all!) had stopped was enough to send people onto the streets: to look, to find friends, to appraise the devastation of the massacre and see the new streetscape.

While my colleagues and I were mobile --going from Red Crescent shifts in Jabaliya to Ramattan news in Gaza to our seaside apartment --and thus saw and heard most of the bombing or the immediate aftermath, many Palestinians had kept holed up in their homes, feeling whereas no where was safe, they might as well live and die together, as so many did.]

On the first of three days of Eid, children are the most prominent sight, glittering and colourful in flash new clothes (even though in the end they are the poor-quality items that come through the tunnels… they are new, at least). post continues

*street vendor selling 1 shekel and 2 shekel nut bundles, wrapped in notepaper

(IPS) By Eva Bartlett- There are few parks and green spaces in Gaza, and those that exist are crowded with people hungry for nature. Day and night, people of all ages flock to the Joondi, or the park of the Unknown Soldier, in central Gaza City.

Vendors set up, selling roasted nuts, falafels, cold drinks, tea and coffee. Further east, Gaza’s main garden park, charging one shekel (25 cents) admission, hosts some groomed shrubbery, decorative trees and flowers. It pales in comparison to arboretums elsewhere, but it is a bit of green in an otherwise grey Strip.

On Gaza’s main east-west street Omar Mukthar, the more upscale shopping area of Rimal attracts clothing, perfume, electronics and souvenir shoppers. The inventory is a sad collection of cheap fabrics and highly expensive electronics. Gazans have no other choice, save the tunnel markets in Rafah. But in the end, the majority of goods come via the same tunnels, and end up all being overly expensive. post continues

A collective sigh goes up with sunset: the last day of fasting has finished, life can resume to normal. For many, the month has been trying, difficult to fast during the absurd heat, with added stresses that Muslims around the world may not face to such a degree (near 50% unemployment and 90% extreme poverty, the wreckage of the Israel massacre of Gaza still achingly visible, the Israeli attacks from sea, border regions and air, the closed borders and closed opportunities).

For many, not being able to have that calming cigarette, let alone water to re-hydrate, has led to greater nervousness and irritability, fatigue, depression.

But that aside, I saw much love and generosity in Ramadan, despite the expected low-blood-sugar irritability. post continues

On 15 September, we join farmers and residents, including a contingent of women, youths and men, in a non-violent walk to the border region east of Beit Hanoun in the north of Gaza, singing and chanting as they march past Israeli army razed fields and destroyed water tanks and cisterns. The march is in the tradition of popular resistance in Palestine, more widely known worldwide in the villages of Bil’in and Ni’lin, but equally practised all over occupied Palestine, including Gaza, in the simplest of acts: farming and accessing land which the Israeli authorities’ policies continue to attempt to render barren and void of Palestinian life. post continues