The Gaza Blog

Although Gazan Christians remain tentative about their future, they say are not living in fear.

Israel may have 'partially reopened' the Erez border crossing, but 95 per cent of Palestinians are still imprisoned inside the Strip.

Israel's full-scale closure of the Strip has lasted 28 days, with no sign of a let-up, and life inside Gaza gets grimmer by the day.

Twenty days on and the Gaza Strip is still closed. Everyone who lives in Gaza is either locked in, or out.

Israel is responsible for a hell of a lot of the misery and human rights violations in the Gaza Strip: but Hamas is also harassing, interrogating and mistreating civilians. Between them, Israel and Hamas are choking the life out of the people trapped inside Gaza.

Gaza is not facing a humanitarian crisis: this is a human rights crisis.

The international media has devoured the story of Palestinian and international human rights activists, doctors, academics, parliamentarians and lawyers sailing through Israeli gunboat-infested waters to reach the besieged Gaza Strip. But inside Gaza, the reaction has been decidedly mixed.

As a consequence of the illegal siege, many Gazans are literally going underground to circumvent the border controls that keep them imprisoned.

I am stranded and can’t get home. I left Gaza early Friday morning, before the border at Erez closed, and thought I would be back at home by Sunday afternoon: but this is turning into a bit of an epic.

The festival of Eid al-Fitr ended a couple of days ago, and most of us in Gaza have just dragged ourselves back to work. After the sluggish month of Ramadan – when most people fasted, followed by a week of almost solid eating, drinking and visiting friends and relatives – it’s actually a bit of relief to get back to being busy every morning.

Resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine comes in many forms: every Friday, Israeli, Palestinian and international activists gather in the village of Nil’in, near Ramallah, in the Palestinian West Bank, to protest peacefully at the construction of a new slab of Israel’s so-called ‘Barrier Wall’ that will slice through Nil’in and separate the villagers from their land. And every Friday the activists are teargassed by Israeli soldiers, and sprayed with a foul-smelling liquid: they are often shot with rubber-coated bullets too.