It has just taken me almost two hours to get through Qalandia checkpoint, have just stepped around the last of the barbed wire. There are a few more checkpoints to go before I reach the office. None could be as bad. Partly to settle my nerves, partly to check in, I dial a colleague’s number on my mobile. My hands are still shaking. Read more about Teargas, bullets and a cage: Trying to get home
The breaking points are sometimes small, innocuous. You can’t sleep for a week because the Israeli shelling is so bad, there are continuous and horrible reports of death, but we’re fine- “I’m fine. No, I’m ok. Really.”—- then something as silly as trying to fold an omelette in the frying pan, it breaking, and then- the tears fall. Read more about Teargas, bullets and a cage: Getting to school in Palestine
The makeshift tank barricade on my street is gone. The twin piles of sand were probably never meant to do much more than provide area residents like myself with some sense of security. Read more about Gaza On Departing
Jara and I play in the neighbour’s garden under the pleasant Mediterranean sun. ‘Do you have everything?’ she asks the neighbour. It is one of those routine questions which people now ask each other and which she has picked up as a normal way of showing concern. Read more about Letter from Bethlehem
The Israelis didn’t see it coming. Clearly, after the failure to get people inside on April 28, they must have assumed that the International Solidarity Movement did not pose a threat to their siege of the Church of Nativity. Read more about Entering the Church of Nativity
Almost 3am, and there is no point in trying to ignore the sounds and to try sleeping anymore. It is just too loud, too near. The heavy machine gunfire, the thuds of tank shelling. Read more about Can you hear the shelling?
‘When they begin shelling the houses, we want to go to our relatives’. So we all go to my brother’s house next to us. We all move over there. Then the Israeli soldiers come with the bulldozer and the tank. They tell us to come out of the house. Read more about Three testimonies from Jenin