MAP’s Kate Mason travelled to Gaza for the first time in October as part of a mission to explore new programme options following the recent conflict that killed over 2,000 Palestinians and injured over 10,000.
It’s different to actually see Gaza after having learnt so much about it – I realised that before coming here, in my mind, Gaza had been little more than a set of statistics about food insecurity and children killed by Israeli attacks. What struck me then was that on many roads in Gaza, seen in a snapshot, you could easily be in any other country. At some times it was hard to reconcile that image with the 80% food insecurity figure. There are no toddlers staggering around with distended stomachs; the streets were busy, everyone getting on with that day’s errands and with normal life.
But if you step away from that snapshot image, pause to watch the street scene for more than a few minutes, there are clues as to the differences between life here and outside the strip. There seem to be schoolchildren everywhere, throughout the day, for example. This is because there simply aren’t enough schools in Gaza – almost every school has to operate in three shifts meaning that children are taught for no more than three hours a day. If you look closer too, you can see the generators outside almost every building, waiting for the minimum 12 hours of power cut Gaza experiences each day.
The children on the street however, look incredibly neat and well presented. Their uniforms are pristine, their hair combed and schoolbags unscuffed. They run and skip along the side of the road in small groups laughing and joking, seeming, for that moment, that the horrors of the summer are forgotten.
Yet every one of those children was impacted in one way or another by the two month bombardment. They may have lost classmates – over 500 children were killed – others will still be recovering or coming to terms with disability – over 1,000 children will have been made permanently disabled by attacks. They may also have lost family members or a safe place to live. Some may still be living in shelters, unable to return to their destroyed homes. Their parents, if they had jobs before the attacks, may have lost that source of employment and with it a secure income. All will experience the water and power shortages which have increased since key infrastructure was damaged or destroyed.
In that snapshot however, you don’t see this hardship. We watched one boy, who looked clean and happy, the white of his school shirt as good as new, peel off from his friends to go into what used to be his home in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood of Gaza city. Now, his family’s house is a pile of rubble with a couple of sheets strung up for privacy and whatever furniture they could salvage arranged inside, visible through the gaping holes in what used to be the walls. But this boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, ran inside to greet his family as if he was returning to a palace.
What struck me about Gaza was that, apart from the destruction - in some areas whole neighbourhoods have been flattened to the ground – the poverty and hardship was often masked by a barrier of pride and dignity that is maintained even by those in the harshest conditions. You only have to scratch the surface however to reveal living conditions which are fast becoming un-livable. In our hotel, when the power went out, it came back on almost immediately and, in my room, the TV and wifi flickered back to life. Across Gaza meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people were reaching for the candles or torches, or going up to the roof to start the generator.
The capacity of the Palestinian people in Gaza to get up, dust themselves off, and carry on was evident in every street and in every person we met. But the feeling of claustrophobia was also there; the desire to get out – to get away to any other place and leave the hardship behind once and for all.