Access to the Faraj Allah home in al-Nussairat camp is through a passageway so narrow it entraps the granny – a diabetic, immobilised by obesity at the age of sixty-three. (She was born under a lemon tree during the Nakba, as her family fled from Ashkelon.) Nita called a warning greeting as we approached a ragged blanket hanging in a doorless doorway. The two-roomed, earthen-floored concrete shack was windowless and furnished only with bed-rolls, serving as divans by day. Granny sat just inside the doorway, fondling a toddler. Her daughter Tahany, mother of nine, was the most beautiful woman I saw in Gaza, with a sweetness of expression to match perfect features. The room’s only decoration was a ‘martyr’s’ photograph of nineteen-year-old Ibrahim – Tahany’s second son, shot dead three weeks previously.

In fact this young man was not a ‘martyr’ (i.e., volunteer/militant). He had never been in the armed – or any other – wing of any organisation. But all Israel’s victims are given this status, however civilian their lives may have been. Most families accept the convention though a few resent it. Several times Tahany repeated that Ibrahim was not a fighter, had never been in any sort of trouble, only wanted to work. His colourful 2´ x 5´ memorial poster was misleading; crossed rifles formed a fringe motif but the beaming youth wore a T-shirt and carried a football.

For weeks Ibrahim had been telling his friends that he couldn’t settle to a life of permanent idleness. (Were Gaza an EU government jail, occupations would have to be provided for the prisoners.) But he told no one of his plan to enter Israel illegally, in search of a job. On 20 May, when he was not home by midnight, his parents became anxious; al-Nussairat is not known for its nightlife. At 1.30 his father tried unsuccessfully to ring him. At 1.50 his brother Adel got through and Ibrahim admitted to being near the border. Everyone begged him to come home. Further calls brought no reply and around 3.00 am neighbours reported hearing two artillery shells and ten minutes later many gunshots. Then the police were contacted.

The IDF cruelly postponed their convoluted negotiations with the ICRC and the Red Crescent Society. Not until 1.00 pm was a medical crew allowed to search for the body. The IDF of course knew exactly where it lay – one metre from the border – but they refused to cooperate and Ibrahim wasn’t found until 4.00 pm. By then, according to Awni Khattab, a paramedic who led the search, dogs had eaten most of the abdomen and thighs, inflicting on his stricken family a refinement of emotional torture. Then, inevitably, there were self-torturings – had nobody rung Ibrahim’s mobile, perhaps he’d have got safely over the border …? Nita and I emphatically dismissed that notion. Poor Ibrahim, his only equipment a mobile phone, had no chance of defeating the technology that keeps 1.6 million Gazans imprisoned.

Tahany said, ‘And he only wanted to work, he didn’t want to harm anybody.’ She took an envelope from under a divan and showed me four photographs: Ibrahim aged from two to eighteen. She stroked them with a forefinger and said, ‘I’ve nine children, each different, special. People with one or two think if you’ve nine losing one isn’t so bad. They’re wrong.’

Translating this, Nita had tears in her eyes.

Adel, a handsome twenty-year-old, spoke a little English and with Nita’s help voiced strong views on the IDF’s use of psychological torture (considered by some to be clinically sadistic). At noon one day, in nearby Khoza’a village, sixty-year-old Mahmoud was ordered by phone, ‘Evacuate your house now!’ His was one of three small houses built some fifty yards apart; married sons occupied the others. He and his wife gathered their few cherished possessions and took refuge next door with Hussein, whose wife and three children were absent, queuing at an ISI vaccination clinic. At about 2.00 pm a drone shelled Hussein’s house, penetrating the roof but causing only minor injuries because no one was upstairs. The three ‘lucky’ ones retreated, badly shaken, to Mahmoud’s house. An hour later the IDF phoned again, this time ordering Mahmoud to leave his home within five minutes. Everyone hastened away from the three houses – but none was attacked. And that sort of thing, said Adel, happens frequently up and down the Strip, playing on nerves already stretched taut.

A seventeen-year-old girl sat close to Tahany, never speaking. Her wedding, planned for that week, had been postponed. Children of varying sizes romped cheerfully; there were no toys in sight. The toddler had left granny and was staring hard at Ibrahim’s poster, taken from the inner room and placed opposite the doorway for my benefit. But the centre of attention was a sturdy nine-month-old speed-crawler of infinite charm and energy who paused just occasionally to refuel at the breast. His ambition was to escape into the Great Outdoors, a tiny space between concrete shacks. Whenever retrieved from the doorway he chuckled gleefully instead of yelling frustratedly, then rolled his gleaming eye at everyone before zooming off on his next circuit of the floor, dribbling as he went. Adel, especially, was quite besotted by his hyper-active brother and lamented my being cameraless.

Not all Gazans can afford gas cylinders and this family cooked in a lean-to on a mud-stove built by Father and fuelled by whatever flammiferous substances the children could scavenge. Given so few shekels, and these cramped living conditions, how did Tahany manage to rear such a happy, healthy family? All were neatly dressed, well groomed, well-disciplined and affectionate with one another – while she herself remained unfussed and quiet-spoken, amidst all the to-ing and fro-ing and frequent demands on her maternal inventiveness. To me she seemed a superwoman, one of many I’ve met among Palestinians. Some experts describe what they observe in the camps as ‘a great waste of human resources’.

Tahany and Adel urged us to stay for lunch: soon Father would be back from his camp co-op job (a fruit-growing co-op; Gaza is famous for its strawberries). I would have liked to spend much longer with this enchanting family but Nita’s time was limited. On realising this, Tahany sent a couple of children to a shop (I later discovered) to buy two plastic boxes in which to pack delicious rice and vegetable lunches for Nita and me. A variant of Mohammed and the mountain: if guests won’t stay for a meal they must take it with them. Before we left, I arranged to visit again on the following Friday afternoon when Father would be back from the mosque.

As our taxi bumped through Bureij camp we heard bouts of sustained shooting. According to the other passengers, trouble had started at sunrise when the IDF moved 200 metres into the buffer zone. There they levelled wide areas under crop, a brutal loss for the farmers concerned who had already risked their lives to plant those seeds and were being kept off the scene by irregular random shelling. Next day, we heard the IDF withdrew at sunset and no casualties were reported (apart from the crops).

The al-Tarabin home in Rafah camp – two-storeyed with a patch of back garden – was minimally furnished and unwired for electricity. We were received in an empty living-room by seventeen-year-old Yazan, handsome and charming and head of the household since 7 April, when his thirty-eight-year-old father, Saleh, was killed with two friends, twenty-five-year-old Mohammed and seventeen-year-old Khaled (Yazan’s classmate). The three (all civilians) had been stunt-riding on Saleh’s vintage motorbike at the former Gaza International Airport, one of the Strip’s few open spaces. At about 4.00 pm, ten artillery shells came from the nearby border and moments later two helicopter gunships opened fire. Mohammed and Khaled were killed instantly, Saleh lay bleeding on the ground for two hours while the ICRC and a Red Crescent ambulance tried frantically to start negotiations. At 6.00 pm a brave group of despairing neighbours (all civilians) risked approaching the bodies without IDF authorisation. At once a shell killed twenty-year-old ‘Obaid al-Soufi. Fourteen others, including five teenagers and a paramedic, were seriously wounded. By then Saleh had bled to death and ‘Obaid’s family couldn’t reconcile themselves to the idea that their son was ‘wasted for nothing’.

Haia appeared then, carrying a baby and followed by her six other children who sat in a silent row against one wall, staring at the stranger. She was a tall, heavily built thirty-six-year-old with a chronic eye infection – caused by too much weeping, said the doctor. Her hands trembled as she filled little tea glasses and she hadn’t slept normally for two months. The most tormenting thing, Yazan explained, was the image of Saleh slowly bleeding to death because no help was allowed. The paramedics said he would certainly have lived but for ‘negotiations’.

Haia came from the West Bank and had no family on the Strip; her mother lived in Tulkarm and now longed to be in Rafah. Since the day after Saleh’s murder she had been trying doggedly to get an ‘emergency permit’ to visit, with little hope of success. The phrase ‘on compassionate grounds’ has no meaning for Israeli officialdom. Mother and daughter spoke daily on their mobiles – a costly routine, subsidised by a rich man in Tulkarm as part of his zakat, his charitable duty as a Muslim.

The children reflected their mother’s distress. During the summer holidays Saleh often took them all to Gaza’s most beautiful beach, near Khan Younis and previously reserved for settlers. Now they didn’t want to go, they missed him even more when remembering the games they used to play together. Apart from that, the three girls – aged thirteen, fourteen and sixteen – couldn’t go to the beach (or anywhere else) without an adult male relative; and Yazan had inherited his father’s truck-driver job. Nita caught my eye and made a soothing gesture. She could guess what I was thinking – ‘How outrageous that a girl old enough to be married can’t take her younger siblings to the beach!’

Haia beckoned us into the larger room where big cardboard cartons, with childishly written name labels, were stacked in corners; improvised chests-of-drawers. High on one wall, facing the window, hung a triple ‘martyrs’ memorial’, photographs of the murdered men wreathed in Koranic quotations with no hint of militarism. Then we were led out to the yard and a shed door was unlocked to show us the shelled motorbike – a sinister contortion of metal, scarcely identifiable for what it was. Saleh had been very proud of it, said Yazan. Trying out new stunts was his hobby. As we were leaving, Haia embraced me, began to sob and said I reminded her of her grandmother who had white hair and didn’t wear the hijab.

A private taxi took us to our next destination; it was off the serveece routes and involved culture shock on a seismic scale.

The driver speculated about the airport killings – perhaps yet another case of ‘collaboration gone wrong’? Someone with a grudge against one of the dead men’s clans fingering them as terrorists? Or the IDF misinterpreting information? Or simply an informer so frantically in need of IDF cash – maybe for a good purpose, like buying medical care abroad for a dangerously ill child – that nothing else mattered and lies were invented. Gaza’s blockade creates unique exigencies. And Israel’s ‘war on terror’, with its heavy dependence on buying information from within a grievously impoverished population, has inevitably led to some degree of moral degeneracy. As she translated, Nita emphasised that all this was no more than speculation, though sufficiently grounded in past events to be noted. She was meticulous about my ‘getting the facts straight’.

Outside a metal double gate, set in a long, fifteen-foot-high brick wall topped with razor-wire, Nita startled the driver by saying ‘Stop!’ This was an unexpected vision on the outskirts of a Gazan village and he waited, looking curious, while Nita dealt with an electronic device. When nothing happened he laughed and made some teasing remark which provoked her to bang on the metal. Moments later we were admitted by a young manservant who eyed me suspiciously. Ahead rose the Oslo-era home of a notable family which had prospered during that brief boom. It was very large, incorporating pinkish stone, brownish marble and garish stained glass. The architect had come under the influence of many styles, discordant when combined. We were led across a wide palm-fringed courtyard, its centrepiece an elaborate fountain unlikely ever to spout again. An abundance of crimson and yellow shrubs flowered in tall, bulbous pottery jars. Many balustraded steps led to a wide, tiled verandah furnished with well-crafted wooden benches – uncushioned. When the bereaved mother joined us, wearing a wondrously embroidered Palestinian traditional gown, she called for the standard plastic garden chairs. Then she welcomed me in English – kissing me on both cheeks, as is not the custom – and I guessed she was used to meeting foreigners.

Our hostess’s composed cheerfulness surprised me, less than two months after the shelling of her twenty-five-year-old first-born and his comrade – members of a Qassam unit which had just fired a home-made rocket into Israel. The family hadn’t known of his activism, had treated as a morbid hobby his lifelong obsession with weaponry and the resistance movement. (Masks are multi-purpose.) He worked in his father’s thriving business; not all martyrs are seeking to escape from misery to Paradise.

Looking through three family albums we saw the toddler with his water-pistol and the primary schoolboy always wearing realistic military gear, surrounded by an extensive collection of weaponry and brandishing a wooden AK-47. One chilling picture showed him, aged nine, standing threateningly over a small brother, pressing a pistol to his temple. ‘This is how he wanted to be with Israel,’ explained his mother. But one had to suspect that without a resistance movement this young man would have been elsewhere, seeking ‘action’. His mother may have been better able to conceal emotion than the camps’ bereaved, but her cool detachment disconcerted me. And I didn’t feel it was contradicted by the shrine in the basement.

Dainty slippers were provided before our hostess led us into a vast circular space, almost mosque-like, with multi-coloured light pouring down from a stained-glass dome fifty feet above. Slender marble pillars rose on either side and low carved archways led to who knows what other splendours. Scattered about were divans and coffee-tables and inconsequential solid sideboards that surely came from nineteenth-century Germany – all looking like doll’s-house furniture in this unhomely space. Ahead, beyond a high archway, we glimpsed a sweeping double staircase – then were led along short vaulted corridors and down several flights of steps to the basement, cool and well ventilated and big enough to house half-a-dozen camp families. Yet it seemed to be unused, apart from the shrine at one end – virtually a chapel. A triptych ‘altarpiece’ stood on a long table supporting four large vases of irises and a display of the martyr’s possessions – toy weapons, a massive Lego tank and other military vehicles, football boots, boxing gloves, surf board, laptop, cell phone, an al-Aqsa University briefcase, watch, worry beads and framed school certificates showing how well he had done in all his exams. The 10´ x 6´ triptych should have been spotlit but the electricity had gone off (hence the hiatus at the gate). The central panel depicted a lightly bearded, heavily armed Qassam officer in full uniform with a white dove (butterfly-sized) perched on his right forefinger and another on the tip of his rocket while a third (full-sized) flew above his left ear. These, explained our hostess, symbolised the resistance fighters’ longing for a just peace. The side panels showed masked volunteers setting up and firing imported (rather than home-made) rockets. At both ends of the table/altar stood flags bearing the insignia and mottos of the Qassam Brigades. Before going on our way we each received a large glossy poster from the pile kept under the table for presentation to worshippers.

Outside, Nita asked, ‘What’s the English word for a place like that?’

I thought hard. Villa, mansion, fort, palace, manor, castle – nothing fitted. Then the word came. ‘It’s a folly,’ I said. ‘Much bigger than average but undoubtedly of that genre.’ One doesn’t expect such excesses in Gaza but I’m told similar follies shelter Fatah nabobs on the hills around Ramallah.

Nita joked that she was training herself to be a tourist guide in the unimaginable post-blockade future. She had planned a relaxed end to our day, on a Central Strip poultry farm where all the F-16’s victims had been feathered.

Another private taxi took us past al-Zawaida village through an unpeopled landscape close to a section of the buffer zone where many have been killed or wounded. Then stands of palms and fruit trees marked a scattering of small houses, all to some extent damaged when an F-16 bombed the al-Hayeks’ poultry farm. That was at 11.30 pm on 5 March and our driver, as usual, speculated. Had the IDF wanted to avoid human casualties while destroying an important enterprise? It was important for the sustenance of the surrounding population and everyone knew economic warfare was an integral part of the Zionist campaign. Or had they meant to kill people in their beds and got the poultry by mistake?

This was one of those moments when suddenly the sheer improbability of the whole tragedy overwhelmed me. We were talking about the airforce of a government armed and supported by the US, the UK and all their allies. Yet had Israelis chosen to kill the al-Hayek family no one outside Gaza (or no one who is listened to) would have heard of their deaths. Or, if they did hear, they would have made no more than a token protest. Improbable, yes – yet a reality not only accepted by ‘the international community’ but made possible by those governments.

There is little traffic hereabouts and our taxi’s sound brought Hani to welcome us: a genial fifty-year-old, tall and elegant – the sort of elegance that has to do with bearing rather than clothing. He showed us the bomb crater, twenty metres from the house; 120 pairs of birds had been killed, including precious representatives of three rare breeds (his wife’s hobby). ‘Morning after’ photographs proved how hard the seven al-Hayeks had worked to clear up the devastation. There were five children, aged twenty-one to eight, the youngest girls.

Hani remarked, ‘Having three strong boys helped.’ Then we joined his wife and daughters – all stoning apricots – in a palm-thatched summerhouse amidst a fabulous cacti collection, some blooming exotically. They varied from thimble-size to an unlovely giant recently officially recognised as a record breaker (I forget by whom). Hani gazed down at this prodigy the way mothers gaze down at their first-born, reminding me that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. All around distinguished-looking hens wandered and pecked (the vanguard of the replacement stock) and a few turkeys gobbled in the adjacent olive grove. This orderly oasis of silence and comparative greenness felt deceptively tranquil and remote – absurd adjectives in the Gazan context.

Here was another refugee family unregistered with UNRWA. Hani’s citrus-farming parents had left Jaffa with enough cash to start a business and eventually buy a house in Jabalya town. By the mid-’80s Gazan resistance to the Occupation was simmering towards the First Intifada and making urban life increasingly unpleasant. Hani and his bride decided to buy these few dunums and, assisted by three brothers, they built a six-roomed, two-storey house with an outside staircase and a flat roof. Gradually they established a modestly successful free-range poultry farm and an olive and cacti nursery – partly obliterated by the bomb but already Hani had replanted. All the children were born in Gaza City and ISI-educated, not because the family inclined towards Islamism but because such schools were the best available and, if carefully chosen, did not proselytise (as they are all alleged to do, by people and institutions who should know better).

While the 11-year-old daughter brewed coffee, her plump blue-eyed mother plied us with stoned apricots and sadly explained that she cultivated rare plants as well as rare breeds and now all were gone and not as easily replaced as Hani’s olives and cacti. But she spoke resignedly, not cursing the IDF as I would have done. According to Hani, her shrewdness and competence had made possible the success of the family enterprise. And immediately after the bombing her sense of humour had held the children together. Those girls were attractive to look at and fun to be with but not yet back to normal. As we were drinking our coffee both went wide-eyed with fear on hearing a short burst of artillery fire from the nearby border. Before the attack on their own home they had ignored such IDF intrusions.

By then two of the sons had joined us, also attractive personalities, and intelligent, but with poor job prospects. However, because they were prepared to live frugally and work hard Hani believed the farm could support them all – unless the IDF struck again. This was a family united by the challenges of Gazan life and sufficiently aware of its own relative good fortune to be content.

Before we left, the boys showed us their home’s interior damage. It had been solidly constructed, using good quality materials, but now dangerous cracks gaped in several walls and ceilings. The minimum repairs estimate, using family labour, came to US$6,000 – for Gazans a formidable sum.

I promised to visit again, when unconstrained by Nita’s timetable, and our farewell gifts were bags of apricots and glorious bouquets of irises. Then Mrs al-Hayek urged us to call on Izbat, a bereaved friend who needed support, and Hani drove us to the main road, in a minivan redolent of poultry, and waited to see us safely aboard the serveece that would take us to Izbat’s village.

From the junction we walked between a long line of blank grey ‘purdah’ walls and a cultivated space where several men, tending a guava crop, paused to stare at us. Around a corner, youths kicking a football also paused to stare and shouted something hostile. Nita looked uneasy. ‘It’s because you’re uncovered,’ she muttered. ‘This area has gone a bit Salafist – know what I mean? I shouldn’t have brought you here without a hijab.’

I laughed. ‘So much for your plan to end our day on a relaxed note!’

‘Don’t laugh!’ said Nita. ‘Maybe they think you mock them!’ She called a greeting then, cleverly asking for Izbat’s house. His son was one of four Islamic Jihad volunteers recently killed on their training ground by an F-16 missile. The youths, still scowling but no longer jeering, indicated a nearby door. They moved closer to watch as Izbat, after some delay, admitted us to a large yard with the now familiar combination of hens scratching under olive trees. He waved us towards chairs and a little table, without shaking hands or looking at us directly. His dazzling white galabiya seemed to add to his height and gravity.

This twenty-eight-year-old martyr had been an only son, the eldest of seven children. Five of his sisters were married, leaving the youngest to comfort her mother who had, said Izbat, undergone a personality change, didn’t want to meet even close friends, stayed in the bedroom and had lost her appetite. Later Nita told me the full story. This was a Fatah family, loyal in a necessarily subdued way to President Abbas. The son’s open membership of Islamic Jihad caused his parents and sisters much distress and anxiety. A year ago his mother had begged his father to scheme, to contrive to have him jailed by Hamas – then he couldn’t be active on training grounds and go marching around in broad daylight carrying rocket launchers. But Izbat knew nobody in Hamas who might have arranged such a thing.

The ‘martyr’s memorial’ was missing. Izbat said his wife would have found it offensive. He spoke always in a low voice, looking down at his worry-beads, not letting his expression show any emotion. Then abruptly he made a dismissive gesture and began to talk of times past. He had been born in 1956, of parents terrorised out of their village near Beersheva, and he could remember pleasant features of the Egyptian occupation. His joiner father was never out of work and the children enjoyed listening to dance bands playing on the beach. Even under the Israelis, until the Second Intifada, Gazans were much better off than now. The blockade was inflicting the worst suffering on Palestinians since the Crusades. It was meant to ‘cleanse’ the Strip, leaving it empty for settlers and a new Israeli naval port. For the first time Izbat smiled as he said (I could see it coming) – ‘But we won’t go!’

As though to celebrate this declaration the sunset flared – an immense expanse of redness spread to the zenith, momentarily the whole world glowed and Izbat’s galabiya was tinted pink. ‘It’s a good omen!’ I exclaimed. Nita however had a more prosaic reaction. ‘It’s late! We can’t walk past those heroes outside – I’ll ring a taxi.’

Izbat intervened: we mustn’t be so extravagant. His neighbour’s two adult sons would gladly escort us to the main road. A good plan, I thought, but Nita insisted on a taxi: until then, I hadn’t realised how much she feared the Salafist influence.

Reviewing our day, I was again puzzled by the Palestinians’ apparent lack of anger and bitterness and impressed by their resilience – the quiet determination to start again, not to be daunted or demoralised. Nita commented, ‘It all goes together. People are angry and bitter but won’t let outsiders see it. That would be not dignified. The anger makes the resilience. The resilience tells the Zionists “You can’t win”. In the end it will be stronger than suicide bombers and rockets.’

Nita did not accompany me to Tunnelopolis, an area of topographical turmoil where foreigners are not popular and a Foreign Affairs escort was deemed appropriate.

‘Why,’ people ask, ‘does Israel allow all the tunnelling?’ Of course some tunnels are bombed, killing quite a few Gazans, but the network is never attacked on a scale seriously affecting the flow of goods. One theory is that without such a well-organised ‘informal economy’ the extremity of Gazan suffering, as recorded by UNRWA and other agencies, would compel Israel’s allies to take action against the blockade. Therefore tunnels suit Israel. But this theory doesn’t fit with a rumour that took off in 2010. Allegedly, the Egyptian authorities and US government engineers had begun to construct a solid steel barrier, ten kilometres long and 25 metres deep; beneath that, not even the most daring Gazan could tunnel. But if the tunnels suit Israel, why would the US invest so much on a counter-tunnel measure? A suggested answer: profits from the informal economy, run by Hamas and its associates, have become one of the government’s major sources of income and anything that ‘sustains terrorism’ must go, regardless of the Israeli viewpoint.

Many people reminded me that June 2011 marked the fifth anniversary of the full blockade of Gaza, a process begun after the 2005 withdrawal. Until June 2006, 4,000 ‘approved products’ were allowed into the Strip. Then the nineteen-year-old corporal, Gilad Schalit, was captured, and two of his mates were killed, in a raid – through a 600-metre tunnel – on Kerem Shalom military base. In retaliation, Israel reduced the number of ‘approved products’ to 73. And the IDF, driven berserk by their inability to rescue Schalit, bombed several bridges and Hamas government offices and, at Gaza’s only power station, destroyed transformers for which no replacements could be imported. This was/is sustained, comprehensive collective punishment on an unprecedented scale. Imagine the global reaction if the RAF, in retaliation for the killing of two British soldiers and the capture of a third, had bombed Sinn Fein offices in West Belfast and Derry and the bridges and power supply of South Armagh.

Given a ‘mixed’ community, the British government, even if so inclined, was not free to behave thus. Gaza is singularly unmixed. During the Oslo era, Israel severed the Strip from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. As Amira Hass wrote in the London Review of Books (26 February 2009), this isolated Gaza ‘from its population, its education and health services, from jobs in Israel and from family members and friends’. Then came the withdrawal of the settlers, leaving the Strip open to uncontrolled collective punishment, and giving the coup de grâce to the two-state solution, already undermined by ever-expanding West Bank settlements. Yet in 2012, the two-state solution is still being earnestly promoted in the Highest Places: the US State Department, the British Foreign Office, the EU Commission, the duplicitous Tony Blair-led Quartet – promoted by people who are either culpably ignorant of ‘the facts on the ground’ or too lily-livered to face them. Facing them would mean challenging Israel’s right to exist in its present phoney incarnation as a ‘democratic Jewish state’ – doubly phoney because the 20 per cent of its citizens who are Palestinian do not enjoy those equal rights granted to citizens of genuine democracies. Meanwhile a contemptible fiction is being maintained – that Israel’s ‘security’ requires the relentless repression of Palestinians until the ‘peace process’ hatches a peace agreement. In reality there is no peace process and never has been. (I am deliberately repeating myself.) The Zionists have always wanted all of Palestine; a ‘just peace’ doesn’t interest them. The elaborate ‘peace process’ pantomimes, staged over the decades by Israelis and their allies, masquerading as peace seekers, perfectly suited the Zionist purpose. Off-stage, government-sponsored settlers are being allowed ample time to seize more and more Palestinian land unhindered by the ‘international community’.

When Hamas took over the Strip in June 2007 the blockade was tightened again and eighteen months later Cast Lead brought about the almost total collapse of the private sector. In the 2006–2010 period Gaza lost at least 95 per cent of its industrial enterprises (3,759) through border closures or bombing. Between 100,000 and 120,000 workers were left without work. On 19 July 2007 John Ging (then Director of UNRWA in Gaza and a compatriot of whom I can be proud) was quoted in The New York Times: ‘If present closures continue, we anticipate that Gaza will become nearly a totally aid-dependent society, a society robbed of the possibility of self-sufficiency and the dignity of work.’ Given 65 per cent (approximately) unemployment, it is unsurprising that dependency on food aid has gone up from 30 per cent in 2001 to at least 75 per cent (and increasing daily) in 2011. A UN report stated in November 2009: ‘The evidence shows that the population is being sustained at the most basic or minimum humanitarian standard.’

Farming, too, has collapsed. One doesn’t need to look up the statistics; travelling from village to village the evidence is heartbreakingly visible. Some 35 per cent of the Strip’s most fertile land has been put out of bounds by the IDF; 305 wells and 5,000 acres of farmland were destroyed by Cast Lead; widespread soil and water contamination is frustrating most of the gallant replanting efforts. The tree losses, on those 5,000 acres and around bombed homes, are linked to a recent perceptible decline in children’s health and have been precisely recorded by Gaza’s Union of Agricultural Work Committees: 140,965 olive trees, 136,217 citrus trees, 22,745 fruit trees, 10,365 date palms and 8,922 other trees (figures obtained by Sara Roy in January 2010).

Tunnelopolis is not conducive to the collection of reliable statistics … Some say there are a thousand tunnels which, given the area involved, seems very unlikely. Others refer vaguely to ‘hundreds’. I was told, ‘We’ve dug 400 but we’re using only about 200.’ The rest, apparently, were bombed or – more usually – collapsed of natural causes. It’s obviously absurd to label them ‘illegal’ – an adjective more properly applied to the open-air imprisonment of 1.6 million Gazans for whose survival those tunnels are essential. Yet some commentators have given them gangland connotations. Beverly Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell, in Hamas, write of the withdrawal:

Naturally arms come through, plus raw materials for home-made rockets. But on the West Bank and the Strip and in East Jerusalem (let’s repeat this) Palestinians are every day being repressed with weaponry supplied by the US and other members of the UN Security Council. All who have witnessed the IDF in action know that the indigenous population is being held down by force – with help, since Oslo, from foreign-funded Palestinian collaborators. No wonder militant ‘factions’ consider themselves entitled to acquire weapons, through tunnels or by sea or anyhow else, from Iran or anyone else, for use against an occupying army. It is tragic, for all concerned, that they lack a responsible leadership able to restrain them from attacking Israeli civilians within Israel.

Pro-Palestinians often argue that international law allows the people of the Occupied Territories to take up arms against the IDF but by now I’m weary of the ‘international law’ concept. It has been consistently flouted by Israel since that state’s creation. Laws lacking any means of enforcement are ‘Humbug!’ (This is being written on Christmas Day and I’ve just been rereading A Christmas Carol.) I prefer to argue that natural justice is on the side of any people whose land has been stolen by armed robbers, or invaded by powerful alliances using specious excuses (‘spreading democracy’) to install puppet governments in strategically interesting regions.

In December 2010, on my last evening in Jerusalem, I talked with my Israeli friend Ben. Sagely he observed, ‘By now the Zionists have convention on their side. People see the IDF as a regular army, weaponised by the world’s leading democracy. They don’t doubt its credentials. They forget regular armies can’t make up the rules as they go along. I enjoy reminding them that everyone has a moral right to use force to get back their land. Afghans are entitled to kill NATO troops and Iraqis to kill Americans or whoever. People’s shocked confusion can be funny. Even if they hate the Occupation, a national army is fixed in their mind as something somehow respectable. Peasants who pop out of caves to kill them must be bad. It’s the “Peace Now” syndrome – liberals with their guts drawn, dodging the full Israeli reality. In our Holy Land human rights groups try to make non-violent resistance the flavour of the decade – OK, very nice, except the IDF stay with violence.’

Serveece taxis don’t casually enter Tunnelopolis and from Yibna camp Shujaeya, my FO minder, led me across a grim wasteland levelled by Cast Lead. We paused to climb a hillock of rubble giving a view of the Sinai’s edge; a long stone’s throw away, just beyond the border wall, stood a neat little whitewashed mosque. Ahead we could see, amidst high mounds of excavated sand and rock, a colony of large ragged tents and crude corrugated iron shelters, marking the tunnels’ entrances/exits. Several horse-and donkey-carts awaited loads, the unharnessed animals nosing though the detritus, finding occasional weeds or blades of grass. Every hundred yards or so huts like portable loos served as offices for long-bearded, black-uniformed customs inspectors and tax collectors. (If criminal gangs once smuggled drugs, alcohol and cigarettes into Gaza, they don’t any more. Allah is watching …) These toughies, all tall and lean, glowered at the foreigner but were reassured by Shu.

In the first tent we visited, crates and cartons of tinned foods were piled high and a wiry little man with a grizzled beard and a poverty-worn face was about to descend, sitting on a plank like a playground swing seat. He was lowered quite quickly into a wood-lined shaft, 30 metres deep with a two-square-metre entrance. Peering down, we could see him using one foot as a buffer. His grandson assistant, a gaunt poorly clad youth, was hoping to move to the other side of Tunnelopolis – if the new people in Cairo stopped supporting Israel. Ten minutes later the plank was being winched up, laden with crates of fruit juice.

In the three-sided iron shed next door, two men handled each gas cylinder as it appeared from the tunnel and a pair of weedy adolescents were loading a donkey-cart. There had been an acute cooking gas shortage since November 2010 – a crisis that began, Shu said, in January 2010. Then Israel closed the Nahal Oz crossing, where all fuel and cooking gas supplies used to enter, and decreed that in future they must come through Kerem Shalom where, for security/technological reasons, only a fraction of Gaza’s daily needs could be handled. Said Shu, ‘We know some special Israelis are paid to sit at a desk looking for new ways to make us more stressed.’ A ridiculous notion – until you stop to consider the multiple constraints of daily life on the Strip.

The shaft in the next tent was wider, to accommodate big sacks of a building material resembling fine gravel. Two muscular dust-coated men together heaved these sacks over the parapet, then lugged them outside to empty onto a pile; such sacks were precious and had to be returned to Egypt for refilling. All these workers, I sensed, found my presence discombobulating. The Tunnelopolis vibes are an odd mix of the eerie, the mundane, the excited and the watchful.

In a tattered tent of big-top dimensions, four men, including a customs officer, had gathered anxiously around a shaft and from its depths came the pathetic sound of a motherless, terrified calf being trussed and loaded upside down on the plank. When I saw how young it was I wondered who could afford to feed it and one of the men explained – it was a replacement, his cow had lost her calf. Then I wondered why it hadn’t come through a pedestrian tunnel and Shu hinted that Tunnelopolis was a very complicated place: certain tunnels were controlled by certain people …

The customs officer looked rather amiable so I sought a personal ‘tunnel experience’. Shu tried to dissuade me but permission was readily given. ‘Then you go alone!’ said my minder – being unduly influenced by the 59 tunnel deaths and 115 injuries since January 2010. At that the amiable officer – by name Latif – offered to escort me. We left Shu looking agitated, not realising that no Hamas official would lead an International into a dangerous tunnel.

Beyond the cave-like entrance came a brief gradual slope, then level going for 1,400 metres. Two people could have walked abreast but Latif led by ten yards, carrying a torch not needed; at regular intervals wall bulbs glowed brightly. Underfoot was a little uneven and occasionally damp; throughout, the air felt fresh. To one side ran thin metal rails for the easy transport of goods in what resembled a 25-foot currach made of hide. This tunnel’s central stretch goes through solid rock, before and after through soft sand – contained by wood panelling, the roof beautifully barrel-vaulted. I had to walk only slightly more stooped than I am anyway (by virtue of the passing years). A very tall person might find this distance tiresome but only claustrophobics would regard it as an endurance test.

Where the ground began to slope up, Latif turned and made a ‘Stop!’ sign. Then, obviously pleased by my unfeigned admiration for the tunnellers’ skills, he allowed me to go all the way – so that I could boast childishly of having dropped in on Egypt for thirty seconds. I glimpsed a big indoor space, quite crowded. After a thirty-second visit, I can say no more.

On the way back we met two women and three small boys, all carrying large shopping-bags stuffed with clothes. The women’s mother, resident in Egyptian Rafah, was dying of cancer and when told they couldn’t get an exit permit before 23 August they chose to go underground. Their husbands dared not accompany them; if detected by the Egyptians they might be jailed for years. This cruelty cannot be put on Israel’s charge sheet. Some Gazan Interior Ministry clerk would have refused to move these women up the queue, possibly because their families were Fatah supporters. That’s the dark side of the Hamas moon. As we Irish well know, a civil war’s residual bitterness is peculiarly corrosive.

That evening, my friend Adnan had a very different suspicion: those unfortunate sisters might have been casualties of the next civil war. He said, ‘Without an end to the blockade, we’ll have bloodshed again. This time between Fathi Hamad (the Interior Minister) and the Qassam Brigades. An informal economy gives no one legal control and Hamas will split over who gets what and who decides what. The Brigades resent Hamad’s officials swaggering around like the tunnels are all theirs when Qassam units organised most of the construction.’

Shu, a resident of Yibna camp, estimated that so far some 70,000 Gazans had got tunnel-related jobs and hundreds had been killed, including two of her uncles. On my praising the diggers’ bravery she smiled wryly and said, ‘They’re not brave, they’re hungry. They risk their lives for 50 shekels [10 euros] a day – a 12-hour day.’ I wondered about her estimate but had no way of checking it. Without a doubt, maintaining and replacing tunnels, and operating Tunnelopolis’s bureaucracy, is south Gaza’s main source of employment. Shu believed that this informal economy generates fat private fortunes, especially for Egyptians.

On our way back to Yibna we passed three new cars (unregistered) being checked by a customs officer. They had come through a tunnel I was not allowed to see; exotic gifts from Iran may also use it. (Cattle certainly do, though not often; they tend to panic.) A car costing US$10,000 in Egypt is worth US$30,000 after its tunnel experience. In August 2010 the IDF publicised an end to their three-year ban on motor imports; 60 cars a week were to be allowed through. Ten months later, complained Shu, not one vehicle had been admitted – nor any urgently needed spare parts. Simple parts could be made locally – that’s how her father earned half a living – but modern cars often need micro-surgery and stood idle all over the Strip for lack of it.

That misleading IDF statement had been part of a wider scheme. In May 2010, when a ‘Free Gaza’ flotilla tried to break the blockade, the IDF provoked global outrage by killing nine campaigners in international waters. On 20 June Israel’s Security Cabinet met to recalibrate its Gaza policy. In future, we were told, only items not allowed into Gaza would be listed – ‘weapons and war materials, including problematic dual-use items’. A year later, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reported:

No wonder Gazans resent Tunnelopolis workers being described as ‘black market operators’. There is no other market to operate.