ABC | Nicole Johnston | 26.11.23
Gaza is one of the few places in the world that’s closed off, its borders almost hermetically sealed by both Israel and neighbouring Egypt.
Entry to Gaza through Israel in particular is limited and tightly controlled. While journalists, United Nations staff and aid workers are given the permits necessary to travel there, almost no one else can get in or out of Gaza from Israel.
Years of blockade
There are just three major crossings into Gaza from the outside world, two of which are on the Egyptian border.
The Kerem Shalom (or in Arabic the Karem Abu Salem) crossing in the south is for trucks, with supplies coming from Israel and Egypt. Israel controls this crossing and decides what is allowed in and out of Gaza. Before Hamas took over the strip, European Union monitors were also based at the crossing.
The Rafah Crossing on the southern Egyptian border is the main crossing for Palestinian people in and out of Gaza. It’s controlled by Egypt and Hamas with Israeli oversight.
Palestinians with foreign passports are now desperately trying to leave Gaza through the Rafah Crossing, while a limited number of aid trucks are entering the strip from Egypt. To leave Gaza through this crossing, you need permission from both Palestinian and Egyptian officials up to a month in advance. To complicate matters, the border is frequently arbitrarily closed.
That leaves the Erez crossing in north Gaza as the gateway into Israel. It is controlled solely by Israel. For most of the last 17 years, very few Palestinians — or anyone else, for that matter — have been allowed in and out of Erez.
The Erez crossing is a large, sophisticated terminal originally built to allow tens of thousands of Gazans to enter Israel on work permits. But over the years, Israel stopped letting cheap labour in from Gaza, and permits to leave were rare. For example, a permit may have been granted if a Palestinian needed life-saving medical treatment.
There were also a limited number of work permits granted to Palestinians. Before the current war, Israel had been gradually increasing the number of work permits with an upper target of 20,000 earmarked as a way of keeping the southern border calm. But mostly the Erez terminal has been a colossal monument to the failure of the peace process and to the Palestinian dream of an independent state.
The ‘buffer zone’
Once through the terminal, you’re in Gaza, but it’s another two-kilometre walk to the Hamas-run passport office.
In the distance, you could always hear the thud of teenage boys smashing concrete blocks with hammers. It was primitive and risky. The boys worked close to the border in an area called the “buffer zone” — Palestinian land that the Israeli military had declared a no-go area. The Israeli army’s remote control-operated machine gun towers along the entire Gaza border were known to shoot Palestinians seen inside the buffer zone, even those who were on their own land.
Despite the risks and as Gaza was desperately short of construction materials, the teenagers continued to work in bombed-out buildings, crushing stone to sell. There is a war in Gaza every few years, homes are constantly being destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again. With Israel restricting the export of construction supplies into Gaza — arguing Hamas uses it to build tunnels — construction aggregate was always in high demand.
The sound of hammers on concrete was another reminder of the unique conditions in which Gazans lived. Israel may be one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, but entering Gaza was like stepping back 100 years with its cacophony of car horns and donkey carts.
When Israel’s blockade was at its zenith, it refused to allow cars to be exported into the territory, forcing many people to rely on donkey carts to get around. Israel said the blockade was to prevent Hamas from getting weapons. Gazans called it collective punishment designed to keep the economy depressed, the population weak and Palestinians divided.
In this current war, Israel closed all borders with Gaza and blocked food, water and electricity from entering through Israel. It was described as a total siege, but, in reality, Gaza has been living under blockade for almost 17 years now due to Israel’s tight controls over the land borders, the sky and the sea.
Even during periods of calm between wars there was always the constant buzzing sound of spy drones overhead as Israel monitored the territory from above. Meanwhile, at sea, it curbed how far Palestinian fishermen were allowed to operate off the coast, arguing that restrictions were necessary to prevent seaborne attacks.
My home in Gaza
In comparison to the average Palestinian, my life in Gaza was relatively comfortable. My apartment in the Hanadi towers opposite the port in Gaza City came with stunning views of the Mediterranean Sea. Even so, the electricity still cut out every eight hours — eight hours on and eight hours off — but the building’s generator would kick in to keep the lights on.
Generator fuel was expensive though, and most people couldn’t afford it. That meant Gaza’s poorest families would live without electricity for hours every day.
Now, during this war there is no electricity at all. Israel has cut power supplies and is refusing to allow fuel to be imported to run the power station, claiming the fuel would be used by Hamas to power its war effort. Gaza, once more, is in the dark.
Looking back, even during difficult times, the hospitality I received from my colleagues in Gaza was unparalleled.
I would be picked up by our network’s driver, Ramy, every morning and taken to the office, with the music of Lebanese singer Fairuz playing in the car.
I worked in an office with about 20 Palestinian colleagues and mornings would always start with a strong Arabic coffee. Every couple of weeks, the men would cook breakfast, including the fiery red-hot sauce, shatta, a Gazan speciality. Palestinians love their food and Gaza has some of the best. My favourite days featured office barbecues, cooked on the balcony that doubled as a space that we used for live broadcasts.
With no foreign journalists based in Gaza during this war, Palestinians are having to tell their own stories to the world. Dozens of journalists have already been killed since the October 7 Hamas attacks that led to Israel’s war in Gaza.
A former colleague, Al Jazeera Arabic’s bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, lost his wife, two children and a baby grandson in an Israeli airstrike. He found out while he was reporting and the network continued broadcasting live as he viewed the bodies of his family and buried them. Al-Dahdouh is still working.
Israel says it does not deliberately target media or civilians.
Weekends in Gaza
As an Australian in Gaza, days could pass by without seeing many other foreigners and so I often spent my time hanging out with Palestinian friends.
Fridays were my favourite day. In the early afternoon after Gazans finished Friday prayers, I’d wait outside my building for my friend Samy Zyara and his kids.
Samy would come by in an armoured car simply because he could fit all his nine children in it — there were seven boys, including a set of triplets, and two girls. It always made me laugh to see so many kids hanging out the windows yelling “Ni-cole”.
We’d have lunch, often maqluba, a famous Levant dish with meat, rice and vegetables placed in a pot and flipped upside down when served (maqluba translates as “upside-down”).
After lunch, it was time for a drive to try and expend the energy of all those kids. With a Mediterranean climate, Gaza has great weather, long stretches of sandy beaches and an afternoon sea breeze.
In summer the beaches were always busy, but the sea was polluted. In the south, you could see raw sewage being pumped into the ocean. Gaza’s treatment plants were outdated and couldn’t cope with the growing size of the population. The plants also suffered from Israeli restrictions on fuel and electricity into the Strip and in previous wars Israel has also bombed the main sewage treatment plant.
With large families packed into small houses in the heat of summer, though, kids in Gaza City swam in the sea anyway, often ending up with skin rashes and illnesses.
Rashes seem a small problem now. Samy has moved most of his children, who are now teenagers, 10 times in search of safety since this war began. His wife and two children were in Cairo when it broke out. They remain in Egypt and have no idea when the family will be together again.
Siege on the land, sea and air
Israel’s siege started in 2007 when Hamas took control of the slither of land that makes up the Gaza Strip.
Israel had been gradually tightening its restrictions on Gaza, but once Hamas was in charge, it choked the strip of essential supplies. While Gazans didn’t starve — 80 per cent of residents there depend on the UN for food assistance — the restrictions destroyed the fragile economy and forced thousands of families into poverty.
The Israeli government, which said the siege was necessary to guarantee its security against Hamas, banned items including building material, needles, cloth, cleaning and bathing supplies, books, musical instruments, children’s toys, coriander and hummus. The list went on and on.
The tunnels were lifelines in times of relative peace
To survive, Gazans turned to tunnels and an underground trade with smugglers in Egypt to supply what was missing: everything from fish to cars and soft drink came via these tunnels, which riddle Gaza.
As a result, the tunnel owners became rich, while Gazans grew poorer. Later, both Egypt and Israel tried to kill the trade by blocking the tunnels. Egypt built a steel wall deep into the soil on the Gaza-Egypt border.
Australian cameraman, Brad McLennan, and I crawled through one of these tunnels to the Egyptian border to find Palestinians using an angle grinder to slice through the steel barrier. On the way out of the tunnel, we sat in plastic containers and were pulled through on a small railway track. It took 45 minutes to crawl in, but thankfully only 10 minutes to get back out.
While the world’s attention on Gaza’s tunnels has focused on the hundreds of kilometres of underground networks that Hamas built to smuggle weapons and fighters around Gaza, it’s also important to note that the tunnels under the Gaza-Egyptian border often acted as lifelines during times of relative peace.
Gaza’s armed groups
Whether it’s activity in tunnels underground or Israeli drones overhead, the period of calm between wars in Gaza is tenuous. Every Tuesday, I would have dinner at Abo Hasera, a simple local restaurant, with a friend who worked for a charity. There were a few fish restaurants like this for the middle class and for international aid workers and journalists who can afford to eat out.
One evening, we were in the middle of dinner when I received a work call. A well-known Italian peace activist in Gaza, Vittorio Arrigoni, had been kidnapped by Salafis, a Sunni group that adheres to a literal interpretation of Islam. They had only a small membership in Gaza, but they were making their presence felt.
Within a week, Mr Arrigoni had been killed by his kidnappers — a shocking development that resulted in Hamas’s internal security tracking the Salafis down, raiding their house and killing them.
Mr Arrigoni had folk hero status in Gaza. He was always with the farmers and fishermen, smoking his pipe and supporting them against the suffocating restrictions of the siege. On the day his body left Gaza through Egypt’s Rafah Crossing, thousands of Palestinians lined the streets to show their respects to this young activist who lived among them.
There were always underlying tensions and tragedies like this in Gaza, thanks in no small part to the dozens of armed groups in the Strip. With no jobs, no hope and no future, some young Palestinian men see a job with an armed group like Hamas or Islamic Jihad as the only option left to them. Both these groups are classified by the Australian government as terrorist organisations.
Life under Hamas
Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007 after a short-lived national unity government with its political rival Fatah fell apart, leaving Hamas to fight, and win, street-to-street battles against Fatah.
Since then, life under Hamas has been hard. While most Gazans are generally conservative, until Hamas took power, people had worn what they liked, they drank alcohol if they wanted to and they made their own choices about how they lived inside Gaza.
But under Hamas, a range of sclerotic rules were brought in covering everything from wearing a head scarf to banning skinny jeans for teenage boys. Gazans had no choice but to accept it. Hamas controlled everything.
One Israeli for 1,000 Palestinians
During my time in Gaza, Hamas had one major victory: with Egyptian mediation, it secured the release of 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.
Mr Shalit had been held captive in Gaza for over five years and Israel paid a high price to get him back, adhering to the Israel Defense Forces’ mantra of “no one left behind”.
On the day of the prisoner swap, thousands of members of the military wing of Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, lined the territory’s main highway. These militants were on the street with their weapons in full view of the Israeli drones circling above. They knew Israel would not attack them on the day of the deal.
At the Rafah Crossing, busloads of Palestinian men entered Gaza, many of whom had been in prison for up to 30 years. They included a thin, wiry man called Yahya Sinwar, who is now the leader of Hamas in Gaza and one of the masterminds of the deadly October 7 rampage in Israel.
Sinwar had been jailed for killing two Israelis and four Palestinians who were suspected of collaborating with Israel. Now, he was a free man again. When I interviewed him a few days later, he said he wanted to “join his nephews on the battlefield”. He is Israel’s number one target. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has referred to Sinwar as a “dead man walking”.
The prisoner swap that resulted in the release of Gilad Shalit in 2011 may have given Hamas’s leadership food for thought in its brazen hostage-taking spree. Hamas has said it would release more than 230 hostages it took on October 7 in exchange for all Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails.
The hostages, should they survive Israel’s air attacks, give Hamas tremendous leverage. But until there’s a hostage deal and a ceasefire, it seems only war is left.
Leaving Gaza
I was based in Gaza for work and I returned several times afterwards to tell more stories and to cover more wars, but I had choices and I was always able to leave again.
Most Gazans have no choice. They can’t leave because they don’t have the money or the connections and, in any case, most Palestinians want to stay on their land in Gaza or in the Occupied West Bank to raise their families. By doing so, they live each day with the odds stacked against them.
Israel’s military occupation is 56 years old. For all the talk of a “two-state solution”, in reality the peace process is dead and has been for years. There is no genuine political path forward and no US-brokered talks that look like achieving an independent Palestinian state. This has allowed Israel’s settlement construction in the West Bank to continue apace.
Few Palestinians believe a two-state solution is viable any longer, especially as Palestinian politics is also more divided than ever. The two main political groups in the Palestinian territories, Hamas and Fatah are bitter enemies who for years have competed for supremacy.
The Palestinian government which is controlled by Fatah and called the Palestinian Authority is weak and has no real legitimacy among the people. This weakness and division serves Israel. With the Palestinian house in a mess, Israel can argue there is no “partner” for peace.
In the meantime, war rains down on Gaza once more. It could take the Israeli military months to achieve its aim of destroying Hamas. Until then, Gazans like Samy Zyara and his family live under constant bombardment.
Unable to leave and with no safe places left to go, they will continue to die in the thousands.
Nicole Johnston spent a year living in Gaza in 2011 and visited the territory over a dozen times — covering the 2012 and 2014 wars — in more than a decade spent living and working as a correspondent in the Middle East.
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