During the Nakba (the ‘Catastrophe’) of 1948, following the UN Resolution to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs, almost a quarter of a million Palestinians took refuge on the Strip and Egypt’s King Farouk foresaw them fleeing into his territory should the Zionists grab Gaza. Therefore a boundary was set on 24 February 1949, between two new entities: the State of Israel and the Gaza Strip. To ensure Israel’s security, the Arab League (no friend of the Palestinians, then or now) authorised Egypt to install a military administration in Gaza. In contrast, the West Bank was annexed to Jordan. Benny Morris has commented on the various new borders: ‘In great measure, and especially around the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they followed no natural topographical contours. Often they abruptly severed Arabs from their land and kin. A few villages were even cut in two …’

Under Egyptian rule, Gaza’s modernisation, begun in Mandate times, gained momentum. Newly built cinemas showed the latest Cairo films and traditional home-centred celebrations were replaced by jolly café gatherings, or by music and dancing on the beach. Like their contemporaries in Cairo and Beirut, young Gazans discarded the galabiya and the thobe. Rich Egyptians swarmed in to enjoy tax-free shopping, safe swimming off a smooth, 20-mile-long beach and seafood restaurants with snob-value. From Egypt’s universities hundreds of middle-class students brought back Nasserist dreams and cared nothing for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic Revival, then appearing on the Strip but being driven underground by the military administration.

In June 1967 Israel’s victory in the Six Day War discredited Nasser’s brand of Arab nationalism (socialist and secular). Soon young graduates were coming home from Egypt all fired up by the writings and sermons of leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, men like Sayyed Qutb – executed in Cairo in the late 1960s for ‘preaching sedition’. They could see only one way forward: an unquestioning acceptance of Allah’s will, as revealed to his Messenger in the seventh century AD. Modernisation was out. Qutb’s successors fixed the ‘infidel’ label on all leaders, including Arafat, who allowed their followers to be corrupted by Westernisation in any of its insidious forms.

When resistance to the Zionist take-over burgeoned on the Strip, Major-General Ariel Sharon, then CO Southern Command, launched a year-long ‘anti-terrorist’ operation. In January 1971 hundreds of the refugees’ frail, family-built dwellings were levelled to make way for military roads. Sharon used the Druze Border Police as his crack troops; they celebrated their arrival by shooting dead twelve Palestinian civilians rash enough to ignore ‘Halt!’ commands. Another of the General’s favourite units was made up of Arabic-speaking kibbutzniks, disguised as Palestinians, who could mingle with the Gazans and detect ‘terrorists’. They were ordered to execute their captives promptly. When Ziad al-Husseini, the Strip’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader, killed himself on 21 November 1971, Sharon boasted that resistance had been eliminated at a low cost: 100 or so Palestinians killed, 700 or so imprisoned. To an extent, his boast was justified. For several years Gaza remained politically subdued, its activists focusing on religious reform.

In 1973, when a group of young Gazan graduates established al-Mujamma’ al-Islami (Mujamma for short), the Israeli military governor on the Strip noted, ‘Mujamma is not a problem.’ Sheikh Ahmed Yassin led the Mujamma preachers, urging Gazans to join in a ‘restorative jihad’ to strengthen and purify Islam. The Zionist oppressors were not yet a target; guiding Muslims back to ‘the true path of Islam’ had to precede liberation. (Or driving them back: from the outset fanatical offshoots favoured physical intimidation.) The secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was then gaining stature, globally, as a guerrilla movement but Mujamma angrily denied its right to exercise political control, either within the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) or throughout al-Shatat (the Palestinian Diaspora). The Islamists also denounced Darwinism, thus siding with the most pernicious Christian fundamentalists. They were not trained theologians – so a venerable philosopher told me, when I visited him in his al-Azhar University office. (Gaza’s al-Azhar, not to be confused with Cairo’s.) Mujamma’s fundamentalism, said my learned friend, might be described not as a movement to reform Islam for the sake of all mankind but as a frustrated protest against a system (Westernisation) seen as belittling Muslim traditions while exploiting Muslim workers. To this extent, as the philosopher observed with a chuckle, Mujamma adherents and PLO leftists had more in common than either was allowed to recognise by their leaders.

On the positive side, Mujamma had inherited from the Brotherhood various Islamic Social Institutions (ISIs) set up in the 1950s, despite Egyptian repression, to help Gaza’s disadvantaged. In 1978 the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) administration registered Mujamma as a charity, to the dismay of those Israelis who saw its anti-Westernisation stance as anti-Semitic. From 1979 to 1981 Brigadier General Itshak Segev governed Gaza and commended Sheikh Yassin’s tireless work for the poor, who were consistently neglected by the PLO’s self-serving representatives. In 1980 Segev arranged a consultation for Yassin with Israel’s top surgeons but the Sheikh’s spinal injury (caused by a childhood accident) was found to be irreparable.

To cater for Gaza’s fast-growing population more than 100 Mujamma-run mosques were built within a decade, funded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. These became (and remain) central to the daily life of the poor in most camps, villages and urban districts. In the run-up to the First Intifada in 1987, when Palestinians rose up to protest at the occupation of their territory by Israel, certain preachers were alarmingly inflammatory and from their Friday prayers youthful mobs emerged to taunt the PLO as ‘atheist’ and ‘Communist’. At the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), opened in 1978, lecturers who taught evolution were bullied into dropping the subject. They had no one to defend them; by then some 15,000 of the PLO’s nationalist/socialist followers had been imprisoned in Israel’s remote desert camps. During the early ’80s, in defiance of the Mujamma leadership – which prided itself on maintaining order – many mobs ran amok, burning and smashing cafés, video stores, hairdressing salons, cinemas, liquor stores, libraries, billiard clubs, boutiques and bookshops. Meanwhile IDF troops stood around, watching. Israel’s tolerance for this anarchy has been likened to US support for Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet Mujahedin: another case of what the CIA calls ‘blowback’. These rampages shocked most Gazans, whether Mujamma, PLO or unlabelled. Yet the contrast between the PLO’s endemic embezzling and the incorruptibility of the ISI’s Mujamma officials enabled Islamism to retain the loyalty of Gaza’s deprived. Mujamma might lack trained theologians but few of its members ever forgot Allah’s views on honesty.

In 1984 Sheikh Yassin was arrested for the first time and charged with demanding an end to the Occupation and setting up a militant cell (Hamas in embryo). His thirteen-year sentence shrank to one year through a prisoner exchange but he was forbidden to resume his chairmanship of Mujamma.

On 9 December 1987 the first Intifada started in Jabalya in Gaza and a fortnight later Hamas was born.

In 1993 Hamas condemned the Oslo Accords as ‘a heresy that will lead to the surrender of Muslim lands to Jews’. Edward Said agreed, reproaching Arafat for signing ‘the equivalent of the Versailles Treaty’ and foretelling the Second Intifada as an inevitable consequence. However the PLO’s compromise won international approval and lavishly increased funding. By the mid-’90s most Palestinians, throughout the OPT, had made plain their aversion to any further violence. It was time to put militarism aside, Hamas realised, and concentrate on non-violent community building. As Professor Ali al-Jarbawi of Birzeit University often points out, ‘Hamas is a very pragmatic political institution.’

By then ISIs had proliferated and were doing much to relieve the Strip’s multiple miseries. The unscrupulous Israeli/US-led vilifying of Hamas (shamefully backed up, since Oslo, by the Palestinian Authority (PA)) presents these charities as a ‘front for terror’. In 2003 the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs circulated a report entitled ‘The Exploitation of Children for Terrorist Purposes’. It claimed:

Many outsiders seem unaware of the deep roots, within traditional Islam, of ‘social institutions’ linked to a Muslim’s duty to donate to the needy a fixed percentage of his income. With an obstinate sort of blinkered cynicism, most English-language commentators present all ISIs as an integral part of the ‘terror’ machine. Yet Hamas’ political/military leadership has never had close relations with individual ISIs, though obviously their steady support for the whole system burnishes their image on the Strip – and elsewhere. (The ISIs are so autonomous and diffuse one can’t refer to them as a ‘network’.)

The best analysis of this contentious issue comes from Sara Roy, a US Jew and senior research fellow at Harvard, whose intimate knowledge of the OPT (especially Gaza) extends over the past twenty-five years. She writes:

Islamic social services organisations typically

On Day Two I walked indirectly to the beach, at first along wide streets carrying light traffic. The pavements were ankle-deep in fine golden sand, many of the office blocks, engineering works, stores and restaurants looked either partially used or abandoned. Years ago normal business life came to a halt and while the blockade continues no one is going to invest in Gaza. An occasional shop offered meagre stocks of Egyptian junk food. Commercial animation was confined to al-Majdal Street’s busy roadside stalls, loaded with cheap Chinese goods. I was to discover that a specific item – not seen for weeks – could appear all over the city with sudden abundance when one importer’s order had just come through a tunnel.

Most Gazans are monolingual but keen to help a stranger. When I asked the way to the beach by miming swimming two amused men directed me down a long, slightly sloping passageway between tall slummy tenements – the edge of Shatti camp. Then, from a low embankment, I could see Ashkelon’s tall factory chimneys smoking a few miles away to the north, in Israel. It was two and a half years since I’d walked along that unwelcoming beach on a cold windy Sabbath morning – I remembered gazing gloomily at Gaza, not believing I could ever clear the bureaucratic barrier.

Here I gave thanks for the relief of a frisky breeze off the Mediterranean. Below me children played on a poisonously littered shore – untreated sewage flowing into the sea, domestic garbage heaped around chunks of people’s bombed homes. The municipality tries hard with limited resources but in many districts overpopulation defeats it. Mopping my sweaty face I strolled towards a wannabe café: a bent tin sheet propped on unequal lengths of half-burned spars with three battered plastic tables under two torn beach umbrellas. Five men sat staring at a patrolling gunboat, looking jobless – a look difficult to describe but easy to recognise. Ersatz coffee was served with a glass of water. Stupidly I had neglected to acquire coins and while a youth was seeking change the oldest man insisted on paying my bill. In Gaza ‘Where from?’ is always the first question and, as in most countries, being Irish is an advantage. Three of those men had had their little boats confiscated and done time in detention for fishing beyond the Israeli-imposed limit.

We were joined by a slim youngish man, an UNRWA teacher who told me in halting yet vivid English how impossible it is to manage fifty 10-year-olds with ‘everything not enough’ – especially when half a class may be traumatised long-term. He taught at his old school in Shatti camp, his birthplace. He himself had had a good education in the ’80s, before UNRWA funding dwindled and pupil numbers soared. In his view, the rich native Gazans think refugees are dirt but don’t dare say so. He showed me pictures of his five children (aged two to nine) and advised me, as I went on my way, to buy a sunhat.

A half-hour walk took me back to Rimal, to the shoal of seafront hotels spawned by Oslo: the al-Deira, the Grand Palace, the Adam, the Commodore, the Palestine, all equipped with generators to evade the daily Gazan reality of prolonged power cuts. They survive now on expense-account guests such as UN agency and international NGO delegations, and foreign and Palestinian ‘humanitarian’ teams who collect statistics to be carefully collated at considerable expense for sponsors powerless to use them. Those visitors’ favourite restaurant is the Roots Club, where one meal costs more than a Shatti couple’s monthly food supply.

The beach is Gaza’s main recreation area – its 20-odd miles free for all to enjoy now the settlers have gone. At 9.00 am quite a few were strolling by the wavelets or swimming, the women walking into the water fully clothed, their long black coats buttoned to the neck, their hijabs firmly tied. Some stood up to their armpits, dunking babies and toddlers, and one swam underwater for a remarkable distance despite her handicap. Probably all had learned to swim at an UNRWA summer camp, during their free pre-puberty years. The school holidays had begun and high-spirited teenage boys were wrestling, leap-frogging, constructing elaborate sand castles or hunting pale brown edible crabs – up to six inches wide – by pouring water down their burrows, then gingerly capturing them as they scuttled away. Meanwhile in waist-deep water their teenage sisters (also fully clothed) played ‘Ring-a-ringa-rosy, all fall down!’ squealing in mock alarm as they submerged themselves.

Near the port a large café had been improvised by placing tables and chairs under palm fronds supported by lengths of old rope. Here a young couple sat on their own, husband talking angrily, wife looking sulky. Behind a one-plank stall stood a wizened, white-bearded man selling packets and bottles of unwholesome things. Reluctantly I bought a litre of water; to pay for water hurts but on the Strip there really is no alternative. Nabil had warned me never ever to drink tap water – or even rinse my mouth, or boil an egg in it. The level of contamination is high enough to penetrate eggshells.

On my way home I called in to the Spartan office of a ‘legal rights’ Palestinian NGO at the top of a wide shadowy stairway in a dismal semi-ruin – formerly a government department. Two friendly young women offered tea and water and explained that the Director was away at a conference in Rafah but would ring me on his return. They disapproved of my walking around Gaza and gave me the card of a private taxi firm, admonishing me never to stop passing serveece cabs – the Strip’s substitute for public transport and much too risky! All their foreign friends were agreed on that. I didn’t argue; yet I couldn’t bring myself to use that card. Shared taxis are valuable conversational seedbeds. And Vittorio Arrigoni’s was the first abduction of a foreigner since Hamas took control.

Soon I was leading a compartmentalised life, sometimes with my Fatah contacts to whom I had introductions from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, sometimes with my expanding circle of Hamas contacts. There were none of the mixed debates I had often enjoyed in Nablus between Fatah and Hamas supporters and ‘neutrals’. My new friends would talk politics only within the security of their own homes – and then often in elliptical terms that might have bemused a visitor not so soaked in ‘the Problem’.

All over the Strip small green Hamas flags fluttered high but one saw no signs of macho triumphalism, no heavily armed soldiers patrolling the streets or ostentatiously guarding government offices or banks. Fatah supporters tended to mutter darkly about the entire population being kept under surveillance, day and night, by sinister plainclothes operatives. This may indeed be the case: a foreign visitor wouldn’t notice. I was happy to exchange the West Bank’s omnipresent hard-faced IDF and PA security forces, their weapons always at the ready, for Gaza’s occasional pairs of bearded, vaguely uniformed men who sat chatting and smoking at street corners, their shared weapon on a lap or hanging on the back of a chair.

In 2007 Hamas’ rapid restoration of public order confounded its critics. Operation Desert Shield – the Israeli response to the Second Intifada – had left the Fatah-controlled security machine in bits and five lawless years later, when Hamas took over, no one expected the miracle that happened. Since 1987 Hamas had been training and arming its military wing, from which special units were now deployed to uphold the law – often using methods of which house-trained democrats might not approve. For Palestinians the tensions on the Strip are certainly no less than on the West Bank though of a different (in some respects) order. The Hamas/Fatah antagonism, of which I was so aware in Nablus and Hebron, has another sort of flavour where Hamas is in control: a flavour of dictatorship. To me this tasted less unsavoury than the PA’s collusion with Israel, which coexists with open IDF support for ever-increasing settler aggression. But then, I was not trapped on the Strip.

Improbably, one government department became my home-from-home, where I could drop in at any hour between 8 am and 3.30 pm to have a stimulating discussion about ‘the way ahead’, or to refill my water bottle or empty my bladder or seek guidance to some particularly obscure camp address. The Department of Foreign Affairs is housed in an imposing Mandate-era mansion approached through unguarded gates and a well-tended blossom-bright shrubbery. Its large rooms are either empty or staffed by underworked men and a few women – their office of course segregated. The numerous English-speakers were happy to talk with an Irish citizen and my being a compatriot of John Ging, the head of UNRWA during Operation Cast Lead, counted for a lot.

As on the West Bank, comparisons were often made between Britain’s reaction to the IRA’s illegitimate campaign in Northern Ireland and Israel’s reaction to the Palestinians’ legitimate armed opposition to the IDF as an occupying force. How would the world have reacted had the British armed forces, seeking to eliminate IRA activists, repeatedly bombed houses in Derry and Belfast, murdering whoever happened to be at home, and bulldozed barns and cottages around the countryside, and killed the livestock and vandalised the crops in areas of rural Northern Ireland frequented by ‘terrorists’?

Deeb, my chief Foreign Affairs mentor, ruefully admitted that Palestinians have always neglected to take PR seriously, and have never put enough resources into explaining their case. His colleagues agreed that when given airtime most of their spokespersons have been incoherent and unconvincing – whereas Israel’s smoothies keep going with such conviction one suspects them of believing what they are saying. Aysha (a forceful young woman who became a good friend) argued that the world media are so Israel-compliant this doesn’t much matter. I saw her point. When Israel sought international sympathy in 2008, as rockets from Gaza began to reach Beersheva, no mainstream commentators pointed out that the IDF regularly attacks Palestinians using US F-16 bombers, Apache attack helicopters, Merkava tanks, naval gunships and made-in-Israel computerised armed drones – these last ranked among the world’s most technologically advanced weapons. Why do media interviewers never ask the obvious questions? For instance: ‘How many have those rockets killed since the first was fired in October 2001? And how many Palestinians have the IDF killed in the same period?’ In December 2008, before Cast Lead, the respective answers were: 14 and more than 4,800. By June 2011 Gazan rockets had killed a total of 23 Israelis and one Thai farm-labourer. In 22 days Cast Lead killed more than 1,400 Gazans.

As Deeb pointed out, Israeli hasbara (propaganda) relies heavily on the sort of confusing misinformation that makes outsiders feel they can’t really understand what’s going on – so they lose interest … Example: Mahmoud Abbas, as an individual, was the Palestinians’ lawfully elected President until 9 January 2009. But his party, Fatah, had no mandate to rule after January 2006. Therefore Hamas’ pre-emptive strike against the CIA-backed Fatah militia, in June 2007, did not ‘oust the rightful government from Gaza’. The CIA had intervened to destroy the National Unity Government set up in February 2007. Another example: in June 2006, five months after Hamas’ election victory, the IDF reduced the new administration’s talent pool by jailing dozens of Hamas ministers and elected representatives described by hasbara as ‘terrorists’. Very confusing for the general public! Why were terrorists allowed to stand as candidates in an EU-funded and supervised election? Hasbara didn’t explain that the ‘terrorist’ designation came after the election victory. Again – hasbara blamed Cast Lead’s high death toll on Hamas’ use of ‘human shields’. The Strip is flat and bare, lacking hills, caves, woods or swamps. Where were 1.6 million Gazans supposed to take shelter?

Israel produced a new National Information Directorate to coordinate Cast Lead hasbara (lies that cancel each other out are blush-making). This was akin to the US-based Israel Project, responsible for a 100-page advisory document (stamped Not For Publication) which delighted Shimon Peres. He noted, ‘This has given Israel new tools in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the world.’ To complement such tools, all foreign journalists – embedded or freelance – were excluded from Gaza throughout Cast Lead. As an exercise in censorship this backfired badly; millions of viewers and listeners became dependent on al-Jazeera’s show-it-all reporting and in many cases switched their loyalty to that station.

It was a relief to be able to move around unchallenged by the IDF, yet their mechanised nearness soon came to seem far more threatening than those personal encounters unavoidable on the West Bank. Gunboats patrol Gaza’s coast, unmanned drones and F-16s patrol Gaza’s sky, tanks, jeeps and APCs patrol Gaza’s border fence. Nor is there anything ‘symbolic’ about all this weaponry. Gaza, as a ‘hostile entity’, may legitimately (in Israeli eyes) be attacked at any moment from sea, air or land. Attacks are frequent though rarely noted by the international media; each kills or injures no more than a few Gazans. Warplanes also regularly bombard open spaces likely to be used as training grounds by resistance groups. Those massive explosions greatly distress children not yet recovered from the traumas of Cast Lead. Discussing all this with Nita, a Khan Younis cousin of one of my Balata friends, she told me that her youngest sibling, a five-year-old boy, has been permanently deafened by a sonic boom – another IDF terrorist technique. Then Nita offered to be my advisor and, crucially, my interpreter if I wished to visit some of the families bereaved since 1 January 2011. More of that anon.

Israel’s blockade uniquely handicaps Gaza, yet in one respect the Strip resembles other economically divided societies, its rich class seeming quite detached from the surrounding poverty. When Khalil introduced me to a nearby small supermarket I realised that Gaza’s privileged minority can buy anything transportable through tunnels. The rest of the population depends to some extent on food aid – from UNRWA, or an Islamic charity, or one of the few international NGOs still present. These keep their institutional heads well below the parapet; most offices and vehicles go unmarked, apart from Médecins Sans Frontières whose minivan twice caught my eye. In a month, a four-person International Solidarity Movement (ISM) team were the only foreigners I met; no expat workers were visible.

It upsets Gazans to hear sympathetic foreigners bewailing their ‘humanitarian crisis’. Everyone with whom I talked emphasised that they do not want to be regarded as people in need of ‘aid’, like earthquake or famine victims. Their crisis is political, not humanitarian. Given justice, they are perfectly capable of running as efficient an economy as anyone else. Their past proves them to be hard-working, ingenious people – and proud, hating their present dependence on hand-outs.

All those dire warnings about Bedouin robbers in the Sinai had prompted a change of routine; instead of cash in a money-belt I carried a Visa, my bank being confident that credit cards work in Gaza. However, Nabil, Khalil and Mehat were not so sure – they had long since exchanged banks for known and trusted money-changers. Gaza has a problem of which my ‘ivory tower’ bank knew nothing – a problem linked to what is politely known as ‘the informalisation of the economy’. In September 2007, when the ‘enemy entity’ label was slapped on the Strip, Israel’s banks ended all direct transactions with Gaza’s banks: future dealings could be done only through the Gaza banks’ head offices in Ramallah. But Israeli regulations prevented large currency transfers from the West Bank to the Strip without IDF permission – not easily obtained. Gazans therefore suffer from a shortage of hard cash. And money-changers, who employ their own subterranean methods of acquiring shekels and dollars, have become more powerful than the spancelled bankers.

By 2011 local observers – people well placed to judge – reckoned that more than two-thirds of Gaza’s economic activity was tunne-lrelated, centred on goods ‘smuggled’ from Egypt – and points beyond. I object to the term smuggled; its criminal connotation seems unfair since the blockade has left Gazans with no alternative but to transport goods furtively. Predictably this nice distinction irritated my Fatah friends who argued that Hamas runs the tunnel trade to fill their own government coffers. This no doubt is true but how else are they to fill them, given the Israel/US-led blockage of funding?

Gallantly Mehat volunteered to escort me into Gaza City’s ‘financial centre’ where one of the three banks might be able to cope with a Visa card. This took courage: I could see how tense he became as we entered those enormous, dreary, Mandate-era buildings now associated in his mind with Hamas’ world. The first two were moribund: silent and deserted apart from a few clerks slumped in cubicles, looking bemused and mumbling incoherently when we paused to enquire about the Foreign Exchange department.

Then – action! A bank with a queue! Just one short queue in a wide vaulted concourse but proof that here transactions could happen. These men were, said Mehat, public sector workers collecting their meagre wages – wages they couldn’t have, I reminded him, without a tunnel economy. We were directed to the fourth floor and saw no signs of life as we ascended an unswept marble stairway.

The top floor had been partitioned into a network of mini-offices and in the remotest of these two formally dressed gentlemen, with tidily trimmed beards, seemed taken aback by our arrival. There were only two camp chairs in this tiny space (a very hot space, under the roof) so the four of us stood while the bankers conferred at length with Mehat before committing themselves to looking into the matter when the power cut ended. Their generator had broken down two days ago and they didn’t expect the spare part to arrive for a week or more – possibly even a month. But if I left my Visa details and returned next morning for a further consultation, we should be able to sort the matter out (electricity permitting) – though of course it might take some time … I could feel the tentacles of a bureaucratic octopus tightening around me. Yet when I saw an electronic credit card terminal on the little table that served as a desk I knew all would be well – eventually.

Three rather stressful days later I escaped from the tentacles clutching a fistful of dollars.

On the evening of 11 June I was visiting a Beit Lahia family when news came through of the death of their fifty-year-old friend, Mohammed Sha’ban Mohammed Eslemm, who had been wounded in his own home on 15 January 2009 as Cast Lead was drawing to an end. That 2,000 pound bomb killed twelve people, including six members of the Eslemm family; its target was the Hamas Minister of the Interior, then being sheltered by the Eslemms. I remembered sitting in my Balata room reading the Ha’aretz account of Said Siam’s assassination. A former teacher and founder member of Hamas, he had topped the poll in Gaza in January 2006 and gone on to become an extremely effective Minister of the Interior, largely responsible for the rapid restoration of law and order in 2007. The IDF flaunted him as their second most important Cast Lead ‘trophy’. The first was Sheikh Nizar Rayan, ‘eliminated’ on 1 January 2009, together with his four wives and nine of his children. Mohammed Eslemm had been transferred to an Egyptian hospital on 24 February 2009 – then on 29 May 2011 to an Israeli hospital, where he died.

My friends were relieved to hear of Mohammed’s death. ‘He had suffered too much,’ Sari said quietly.

Amira and Sari shared a small top-floor flat with two married sons and their families; both homes (near the buffer zone) had been bombed in 2010. We were sitting on the child-free roof where Amira grew pots of herbs for sale in the street market.

Sari had been among the 415 Hamas activists deported by Israel to south Lebanon in December 1992. Throughout the OPT this was seen initially as a brutal blow to Palestinians in general and Islamists in particular. The expulsions followed a series of Hamas attacks on Israeli personnel, calculated to secure Sheikh Yassin’s release; he had been jailed in 1991. Hamas’ campaign backfired – but so did the Israeli expulsions. In Palestinian eyes, these came to look like a panic reaction – said Sari – and for the first time made Hamas seem a possible political alternative to Fatah. Also, the Lebanese year drew the exiles close to Hizbollah who gladly provided military training ‘more advanced than anything we had before’. When the Islamists were allowed home, because of international pressure, ‘we had a welcome back like we were a winning army!’

Meanwhile Amira had been coping with six children under twelve and she remembered the 1992–94 years as one long nightmare. Then, partly as a result of the Second Intifada in 2000, economic conditions rapidly worsened throughout the OPT and, as Israel continued to expand its settlements, Arafat’s support dwindled. Factional violence on the Strip increased when the PLO failed to persuade Hamas to join its ranks and pick the fruits of the overt (Madrid) and covert (Oslo) peace processes.

During this period of internecine bloodiness informers proliferated and in 1994 Amira’s brother Riham was executed by al-Majd, a special intelligence unit set up by Sheikh Yassin to detect and punish collaborators. The family was never given proof of Riham’s guilt but Sari said there was no reason to doubt it. Sheikh Yassin, being a wise and just man, made sure that all al-Majd recruits were well-trained and responsible. A Palestinian informer’s shame stains his whole clan but almost always his immediate family is helped by ISIs and on the very day of Riham’s killing his widow and seven children were ‘adopted’ by three ISIs.

On the West Bank I twice heard informers being shot close to my pad and I listened to a few debates with Internationals about the ethics of such executions. Happily no one ever sought my opinion. Under Israeli military rule collaborators are responsible for incalculable suffering, property loss, injury and death. One can’t condone these executions but neither could I bring myself to condemn them where the alternative of life imprisonment is impractical. Every society abhors informers. I vividly remember, in the 1940s, two grey-haired maiden ladies moving from a distant county to my home town in rural Ireland and being identified, in whispers, as the relatives of an informer recruited some twenty years earlier by the Black-and-Tans. An aura of horror surrounded these unfortunate sisters of a man who had betrayed his own – for money!

The news from Syria was unsettling many Gazans and my friends felt concerned about Khaled Meshaal, Yassin’s successor and a long-time exile from the OPT, for years based in Damascus as head of Hamas’ Political Bureau. Sari then told me about the extraordinary events of October 1997, when Mr Netanyahu, in his first term as Prime Minister, ordered Meshaal’s assassination during his residency in Amman, Jordan. Meshaal was already seen as one of Hamas’ most talented young leaders. It’s not nice to bomb or shell the resident of a friendly state, so two Mossad agents, bearing stolen Canadian passports, chose to spray poison on their target. When caught in the act they were arrested and Meshaal was rushed to hospital. As he lay there, his recovery uncertain, an angry King Hussein did a deal with Netanyahu. In exchange for an effective antidote, and the release of Sheikh Yassin and several other prisoners, Mossad’s dudes would be freed. Soon after, Sheikh Yassin visited his friend, Meshaal, in hospital and found both the King and Arafat there to greet him. Then he was helicoptered to a Strip vibrating with cheers and enveloped in banners. These celebrated ‘the Sheikh of the Intifada’ – pictured beside Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’ most efficient bomb-maker, known as ‘The Engineer’, who had been assassinated in January 1996. Sari later showed me the spot where Ayyash switched on his mobile and died. He had been given it by a collaborator.

For Hamas the Israelis’ inexorable assassination campaign had been far more damaging, politically, than Cast Lead – or so Sari reckoned. Between 2002 and 2004 the IDF ‘took out’ most of their senior leaders – and any of their family and friends who chanced to be with them when the missile struck. In July 2002 a one-ton bomb dropped on Salah Shehade’s Gaza home killed the target and fourteen of his relatives. Nine months later Ibrahim al-Maqadmeh was eliminated and five months after that Ismail Abu Shanab. His successor, Mohammed Deif, survived a shelling but was permanently maimed. The following year, in March and April, Sheikh Yassin and his second-in-command, Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, were the targets. Ahmed Yassin was paraplegic, confined by a childhood accident to a wheelchair, and the missile struck early one morning as he was being pushed home from his neighbourhood mosque.

In January 1996, when the first post-Oslo elections happened, the imprisoned Sheikh Yassin wrote regularly to his followers, advising them to take part in the voting. For some years he had been considering a prolonged truce during which Hamas, converted into a non-violent political party, could work to dismantle Oslo from within. In 2000 he sought a ten- or fifteen-year truce in exchange for a genuinely independent Palestinian state in the OPT (as distinct from the crippled creature born of Oslo). Again, not long before his death he looked ahead to the IDF’s 2005 ‘withdrawal’ and suggested power-sharing with Fatah on the Strip. A leader so persistently focused on ‘peace with justice’ could only be a serious embarrassment to governments having a very different agenda. The Bush administration openly approved of the murder of Hamas’ top layer.

Unlike the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Black September, whose deadly militancy kept the Palestinian cause in the world’s headlines during the 1970s, Hamas has never advocated or defended attacks on third party countries or their nationals within Palestine. No such scruples inhibit Israel from assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists or any other third parties deemed undesirable. By now senior Mossad and IDF officers feel free to boast in media interviews that Israel has made assassination ‘internationally acceptable’. Their reasoning seems to be that a crime committed often enough is somehow drained of criminality.

When I first met Gaza’s International Solidarity Movement (ISM) team they were still in a state of shock and none mentioned their murdered comrade, Vittorio Arrigoni (‘Vik’), of whom I had heard much over the past few years from mutual friends. Born in 1975 in a small town near Lake Como, he was a freelance journalist, an uncompromising pacifist, a fervent binationalist and defiantly brave – ever ready to take risks in defence of Gaza’s farmers and fishermen. He had spent the 2005 Christmas season in Ben-Gurion airport’s lock-up and been several times beaten and wounded by the IDF though they knew he was permanently on medication for a chronic heart condition. The Jerusalem Post repeatedly denounced him as ‘an enemy of all Jews’.

Every week Vik rang his mother, then mayor of Bulciago, and on 12 April she rejoiced to hear that after an 18-month absence he was planning a holiday. At once rumour blamed his apparent kidnapping on a hitherto unknown Salafist gang calling themselves Tawhid-wa-Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War). They were said to be guaranteeing his release within thirty hours (by 5.00 pm on Friday) if Hamas freed the Salafist Sheikh Abu Walid al-Maqdas and his two sons (detained a month previously). A brief YouTube video showed Vik bruised, bloodied and blindfolded. Early on the Friday morning police searchers found his body hanging in a derelict house in northern Gaza.

Hamas then allowed the circulation of misleading information, to spare Vik’s family. This fabrication was believed by many – including me, until an ‘insider’ friend reported the facts. Vik, ignoring sound advice, had gone to that house voluntarily and been murdered by a Jordanian who, as the police approached, killed himself to avoid arrest. This essentially unIslamic action (suicide bombers are martyrs) prompted much speculation about the real motive for Vik’s murder and the identity of those behind it. Of course there were mutterings about Mossad. Could this well-publicised crime, coming only eleven days after the West Bank assassination of the film director Juliano Mer-Khamis, have been calculated to unnerve the foreign supporters of Freedom Flotilla II, due to sail to Gaza in July? A few of my Fatah friends insinuatingly recalled that Vik’s blog had more than once openly criticised Hamas – e.g., ‘Since winning the election they have deeply limited human rights by trying to impose hardline Islam.’ Responding to those friends, I deplored this ill-considered judgment; one can’t reasonably blame Hamas for Salafist influences percolating through on the Strip.

In August 2009, during the Rafah mosque siege, a Syrian imam proclaimed Gaza to be an Islamist caliphate. Hamas had long been patiently negotiating with this fanatic, seeking to lead or push him towards moderation. Therefore the five policemen who entered the mosque, hoping to end the siege peacefully, were unarmed. They died beside the imam when he blew himself up and in the chaos that followed Hamas killed twenty-four of the ‘caliphate’s’ adherents. The subsequent discovery in the mosque of hundreds of suicide vests, packed with Israeli explosives, generated another swarm of speculations.

Vik had long since been granted honorary Palestinian citizenship and Gaza’s Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, telephoned condolences to Vik’s mother. During mourning ceremonies in Gaza City Dr Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas’ co-founder and elder statesman, condemned ‘this awful crime against our friends’ and during similar ceremonies on the West Bank Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas addressed the crowds. It would have pleased Vik to see this spontaneous surge of grief uniting so many Palestinians. Meanwhile a Salafist minority, tiny but shrill, continued to jeer at Italy as ‘an infidel state’ and to accuse Vik of having spread corruption by encouraging men and women to meet in public as independent individuals.

On 14 June the ISM team invited me to a commemorative five-a-side indoor soccer tournament at the Rafah community centre where Vik had spent so much time coaching boys who for lack of space could never play normal soccer. This centre, in a cleverly converted factory, is another example of Gazan energy, ingenuity and fortitude. It will take a very long time to blockade these people into demoralisation.

At sunset, in a vast first-floor chamber, we joined a dozen men around a banquet-long table overlooked by tall showcases crowded with trophies won during the past half-century: cups, bowls, urns and trays, all engraved and embellished. The only other woman present was a fiery young Anglo-Egyptian ISM-er, famous for subduing Israeli naval officers. Handshaking became incessant as sporting (and other) notables continued to arrive from all over Gaza. Many men eagerly enquired about my compatriot, Caoimhe Butterly, a great friend of Vik’s, whose courage as a paramedic working throughout Cast Lead won’t soon be forgotten. Everyone received a T-shirt depicting Vik above an Arabic inscription and below the crossed flags of Italy and Palestine. The notables spoke emotionally and at length – until suddenly a piercing whistle signalled the start of the tournament.

In a hangar-like hall, tiered seating for 1,000 rose on one side above a chalk-marked soccer pitch (also marked for netball and volleyball). I found myself in the front row beside Mohammed, born in Rafah camp in 1973. He had graduated in Italy but ‘at the start of the Second Intifada I wanted to be with my family’. He was proud of his wife who, having tasted freedom in Italy, refused to wear the hijab or jilbab. ‘She’s maybe the only Gazan woman so brave in these times! Though not brave enough to wear a swimsuit.’

On my other side sat Khalil, with whom I had already talked several times at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). A small, slight, middle-aged man, he was pale and fine-featured and abstractedly cold in manner – perhaps a cover-up for the sorrow and frustration felt by all such workers throughout the OPT unless they are simply ‘in it for the money’ (which can happen). The PCHR is a rare and precious source of reliable information about contentious events on the Strip. Unreliable information comes by the truckload.

This tournament consisted of four 30-minute matches and the hundreds of youthful spectators were loudly partisan in a cheerful way. The not-so-young players wore soft shoes and quite often had to pause when the chalk dust aggravated their smokers’ coughs. Kicks now and then rebounded from the walls, one just missing my head, but in general there was something soothingly ritualistic about the slow pace and gracefully controlled movements.

Then I became aware that Mohammed was worriedly reading text messages. When I looked at him questioningly he explained. His fifty-eight-year-old mother was on dialysis and in dire need of a drug at present unavailable. That afternoon the doctor had warned, ‘She may die within 48 hours.’ Now a text had told him of a relevant drugs consignment being held in Ramallah because the donor (or some PA bureaucrats?) didn’t want Hamas to benefit from it. There was nothing to be done, though a mother lay dying. Gaza truly is a prison, not metaphorically but in reality. Had some tragedy befallen my family, requiring my immediate departure, I could not have left the Strip before 2 July.

Mohammed showed me pictures of his son, now aged eight. During Cast Lead the child thought their shrapnel-victim neighbours had been killed by flying glass and decided to build himself a house without windows.

The muezzin’s evening summons interrupted the second game. All shoes came off and, though there could be no washing, both teams formed a line led in prayer by the referee. Mohammed commented, ‘It’s not that all are so religious, this is just the custom and the culture.’ He glanced at Khalil who nodded his agreement. Yet again I heard the argument that ‘the Middle East problem’ does not have religion at its root though it so well suits the ‘international community’ (code for the US and its allies) to harp on about Islamic terrorism. Echoing many other Palestinians, Mohammed urged me always to use ‘Zionist’ rather than ‘Jewish’ in relation to Israel’s multiple crimes. In Bologna he had shared a student flat with a Jew who became and remains a close friend. He recalled Palestine’s pre-Zionist harmony and affirmed, ‘We can live together again and we will! Some time in the future, in spite of everything!’ Again he glanced at Khalil who nodded – then added, with quiet vehemence, ‘Support BDS!’ referring to the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law.

Between the second and third rounds all eight teams posed for photographs – with me as the reluctant centrepiece. Minutes into the fourth round the electricity went off, to no one’s surprise. There were disappointed groans but no angry shouts. Matches flared here and there in the blackness and a few ISM torches enabled us to find our way out to the starlit car park. The tournament would be completed on the morrow. ‘Gazans are adaptable,’ observed Mohammed. ‘It’s how we have to be.’

As we drove out of the darkened town, candles were flitting like glow-worms through homes lucky enough to have them. Khalil remarked, in his precise, slightly squeaky voice, ‘Isn’t it sad to think how Gaza seemed in 1660. Travellers compared its cultural life and economic importance to Paris.’

I didn’t feel it necessary to reply; he seemed to be talking almost to himself.