One of my recurring nightmares is about a coming tidal wave. It’s my second least favorite recurring nightmare. My least favorite being the ones about the end of the world. In my tidal wave dreams, the scariest part is the waiting. I know it’s coming. I can see it and I know it will be bad but I also know i can’t run fast enough to get out of the way. Alternatively, I’m stuck and can’t move. Either way the dream sucks… Read more about Gaza: The coming tidal wave 

“I will not forget the massacre until I go to my grave,” says Mohammed. The last time he saw his father, Shawkat, was when he was lined up with some nine other men at a wall in Shatila. He remembers how his father had to raise his hands, placing them on the wall shoulder-width apart. As the little child walked hurriedly away through the narrow alleyways of the wretched Shatila camp with his mother and sister, they heard a loud burst of bullets. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Daddy must have escaped and he will come back to us.’” After several days, however, Mohammed knew that he would never see his father again. The Daily Star’s Cilina Nasser talks with Sabra and Shatila survivors on the 21st anniversary of the massacre. Read more about "We did not have one good day since the massacre" 

“Just as it appeared that the case was lost, it emerged that another complaint against Sharon had been lodged by some Belgian citizens in 2001, only two weeks before the Sabra and Shatila plaintiffs filed their own suit. ‘Everybody had forgotten about this complaint,’ Belgian lawyer Luc Walleyn said. ‘It was sleeping for two years’.” The Daily Star’s Nicholas Blanford interviews Luc Walleyn, one of three lawyers representing the survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in a case that continues to keep legal scholars, activists, and war criminals on the edge of their seats. Read more about Belgian court to rule whether Sabra and Shatila plaintiffs can proceed 

“When my oranges bloomed” my mother used to tell us, talking about her family’s orange trees in Palestine before 1948, “You could smell their blossom all day and all night and for miles around.” We would be sitting around her absorbing every word she had to say about her family’s farm in old Palestine, about her father who was so good in grafting orange trees he was hired by neighboring farmers, both Arab and Jewish, to do theirs. I remember how a smile would slowly appear on her face whenever she talked about “her oranges”. Rick Ikhrais writes from Texas. Read more about The Smell of Home 

“A man in his sixties, with kind eyes and a ready smile, waits until I am comfortably situated before he approaches me, pulls up his shirt, and points to an area just to the left of his navel. ‘lammasini hon, sittnaa!’ he quietly requests, ‘Touch me here, Ma’am!’ His middle-aged daughters sit silently around me, their eyes focused on nothing in particular as I gingerly comply with their father’s request. Touching the damp flesh of his round white belly, I am shocked to feel the hard, spherical mass of a bullet trapped in his stomach muscles.” On the 21st anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, EI’s Laurie King-Irani reflects on the search for international justice on a journey from Beirut to Brussels. Read more about 21 Septembers Ago