The Occupying State of Israel has decided that I have been living with my family and two daughters long enough. After being given a one month tourist visa when I entered through the Israeli border to reach the Palestinian areas (which is the only way to enter), the Israelis have responded to my request for a three month extension by saying one more month would be more than enough. Not only that, but they were kind enough to relieve me from the humiliation and agony of requesting another extension to remain with my family by hand writing, in Arabic, Hebrew and English, LAST PERMIT, on the visa. Read more about The silent transfer: Israel says I've lived with my family long enough 

“You’re just a kid,” scoffed nonogenarian Ahmed Yehya al-Hajj when I told him I was sixty years old. “I have sons older than you and a grandson over fifty.” Ahmed is fortunate to be alive, and not just because of his age. He was visitiing one of his many offspring in the village of Houla when the house was struck by an Israeli missile. First reports were that as many as sixty people may have died, but in fact there was only one fatality and several very serious injuries, some permanent. Still bad enough, for those affected. The survivors showed me the remnants of the missile. They also shared the remnants of their hopes and dreams. Read more about The damage against civilians 

As I walked into one of the largest food processing plants in the central Gaza Strip, the first thing I noticed were two workers sitting idle in the ice-cream production area of the plant. I arrived during working hours, but all the machines were completely stopped. The factory was silent, the silence was overwhelming. The workers, Ibrahim and Hassan, were sitting idle in a corner - not because there is no desire in Gaza for ice cream, but because the Al-Awda factory, for which both workers work, is no longer able to produce ice cream, due to the electricity outages in the Gaza Strip. Read more about Electricity in Gaza: Another Victim of Israeli 'Summer Rains' 

Palestinian parents are huddling on street corners, in cafes and in mosques and talking nervously about the looming crisis in their children’s education. The five month long financial blockade on the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) is now threatening to shut down the education system. With an alarmingly high unemployment rate of 40 per cent and most civil servants, including most teachers without paychecks for five months now, few households can afford the expense of sending the students back to school when the summer holidays end. Read more about International blockades threaten Palestinian schools 

No matter how hard the photographers tried to capture with the camera what the eye sees, the picture cannot fully communicate the scene. It does not take with it the smell, the thoughts, the feelings one experiences while walking among the rubble left by the Israeli war machine. On the TV stations, one can see the toys of children shattered everywhere, broken furniture, torn out clothes. But on the TV stations or on the pages of newspapers, these are just items, objects one sees and one’s eyes get used to them, just like how the bodies of the deceased become objectified while on screen. Read more about What the camera fails to see 

“To the residents of the Amiriyyah building Please visit the Afaq Center, Sayyid Hadi bridge. Please bring along any paper that proves your rent or ownership of a unit in the building. Thank you for your cooperation.” Thus read a sign on the rubble of a leveled building in south Beirut. The building was hit by a bunker buster on 13 of July 2006, the second day of the war, when the Israeli Air Force hit the Nour Radio Station that used to operate from the Amiriyyah building. Amiriyyah is a name that takes us to the first Gulf War, specifically to 13 February 1991, when the United States Air Force committed a massacre in the air raid shelter of Al-Amiriyyah in North Baghdad. Read more about Photostory: From Al-Amiriyyah, Baghdad to Amiriyyah, south Beirut 

Upon arrival in Beirut in early August, 2006, Michael Birmingham met Abu Mustafa. Michael is an Irish citizen who has worked with Voices campaigns for several years. Abu Mustafa is a kindly Lebanese cab driver. Having fled his home in the Dahiya neighborhood which was being heavily bombed, Abu Mustafa was living in his car. Abu Mustafa joked that he sometimes went back to his home in the already evacuated area of the Dahiya, just to take a shower or sometimes a proper nap. Read more about A Proportionate Response