© Dan CohenA Palestinian boy climbs through a blast hole from an Israeli tank shell into a Shujaiya recreation center.
"We are all under unbelievable amounts of psychological pressure. If anyone breaks down and goes crazy in the street, no one will blame them," Belal El-Shafi, 24, from Nuseirat refugee camp told me. Married with one child, El-Shafi works as a dishwasher in the Lightroom restaurant in Gaza City though he has advanced training as a nurse. He earns a meager living that affords a single room and food for his family. "I want to leave Gaza but I would go with my own dignity," El-Shafi remarked. "
We're not living - this is not a life."
As a foreign journalist, the process of exiting the Gaza Strip is a jarring one - not for the difficulty, but for the ease.
Palestinian friends and colleagues of mine who live in Gaza are unable to leave the bombed-out ghetto - they are effectively sentenced to live and die in Israel's open-air-prison. In stark contrast, I seamlessly pass from the dense, rubble-covered cityscape of the Gaza Strip to unobstructed views of abundance in southern Israel - where many of my friends' relatives were expelled from several decades ago.
Since the conclusion of the summer's devastating war in Gaza, the pressure on residents to leave the rubble-covered ghetto has become unbearable.
Between the slash-and-burn Israeli assaults - another of which appears to be inevitable - and the Israeli-Egyptian siege that suffocates the economy and severely restricts the entry of basic necessities, there is little hope among the 1.8 million Palestinians living inside Gaza.
Most of those who wish to escape the Gaza Strip will run up against the iron wall of Israel's siege. The Middle East's most well-armed navy maintains a blockade on Gaza's Mediterranean coast and the southern border is controlled by Egypt, which destroys the once-thriving tunnel economy that sustained life in Gaza. The northern and eastern borders are controlled by a system of concrete walls and fences that are lined with intermittent pillboxes mounted with remote control machine guns, surveilled by high-tech cameras and patrolled by trigger-happy soldiers.
"If I walk to close to the border, Israeli soldiers will shoot me," 18-year-old Ezzeldeen Awad Obaid said with a nervous laugh.
Indeed, Israel carries out what it has euphemistically termed a "
distancing procedure," in which soldiers open fire on any Palestinian who walks within 300 meters of the fence. In practice, soldiers have frequently
shot at Palestinians beyond that distance.
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