April: Kids on wheels in Jabalia & other farewells

Here again are the children of our Jabalia friends, one of the many lovely families I spent last week saying goodbye to. The wheelchair belongs, not to any of the kids thank goodness, but to the father of the oldest boy, who lacks both legs, yet continues to tackle life with humour and enthusiasm. It [...]

April 20: a world without bullet holes

…after two days at the border, I managed to exit Gaza via Rafah into Egypt. I feel a bit stunned at the shinyness of this world outside. Give me a day or two to adjust, and I hope to share some final Gaza writing with you.

April 13: Living in the real world

When we began our first level medic course here in Khan Younis Red Crescent after the Israeli attacks, we found a lot of black humour in the training slides, developed in America, which their authors were probably unaware of. The smiling medic pairs, wheeling Aryan children – sitting up and looking unaccountably cheerful – into [...]

April 11: Disarming by direct action

Last night I was playing chess in the shisha cafe across from Al Quds Red Crescent, where I am sure to find a familiar face and where they seem to have got over me being a girl in amongst the shebab, when I got a text from the south. “Our friends J and L were [...]

April 9: Art in the ruins

In my last post, I told you about the photo exhibition in the middle building (which I tend to call the Social Centre, possibly because someone told me it was called that) of the Al Quds Red Crescent hospital complex. And last week you heard about the concert held in the ruins of the third [...]

April 7: It must have really happened

April 7 is World Health Day, and the World Health Organisation declared the theme for the day to be Save Lives: Make Hospitals Safe for Emergencies. In Gaza, health workers held a morning demonstration which some of my colleagues went on (I was in Faraheen for farming – a medium amount of shooting today).

April 2: Down to the sea

On Thursday we joined Gaza fishermen in their demonstration against the increase in Israeli violence against fishermen and the ongoing theft of their boats. An Israeli gunboat appeared three miles out, but didn’t open fire at us on the beach, as they sometimes do. The report that follows was originally posted at the ISM website, [...]

April 4: Gazans to get soap next week, Israel announces

…so Ma’an news tells us. And they’ve lifted the ban on those other dangerous substances, dates and pasta. Um, thanks Israel. Goodness knows what clean, date eating Palestinians are going to get up to as result. Sometimes you’ve got to laugh or you’d cry, huh?

March 31: The lentils did ok today

Today we accompanied farmers in the Latamat area on the outskirts of Khoza’a. The last time we were out farming in Khoza’a the shooting was the closest I’d experienced, and from the video footage it looked like the Israelis were aiming to shoot my college J in the leg. Since later that same day Wafa [...]

March 30: Land Day in Beit Hanoun

Today was Land Day, celebrated every year in Palestine, commemorating the Palestinian love of the land and also those people who have died for it. Our friend S from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative invited us to join people in the Beit Hanoun area who were going to take direct action by walking into some [...]