10/01/2009 [Extend]

By IBRAHIM BARZAK Associated Press Writer

via Lina Attalah

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip—I live alone in my office. My wife and two young children moved in with her father after our apartment was shattered. The neighborhood mosque, where I have prayed since I was a child, had its roof blown off. All the government buildings on my beat have been obliterated.

After days of Israeli shelling, the city and life I have known no longer exist.

Gaza City, with some 400,000 people, stopped supplying water when the fuel ran out for the power station driving the pumps. We listen to battery-run radios for news, even though the outside world watches what's happening to us on television. The Hadi grocery where we once shopped is closed. Food is scarce all ov... [Extend]

The guy with sunglasses seated in front of me is young, may be 30 years old. He is the contact between Egyptian intelligence and people who intend to enter into Gaza.

Another guy, older, too with sunglasses and wearing a black coat, surely from intelligence, is listening without saying anything.

I'm inside a little office at the entrance at the Rafah gate, on the Egyptian side. I'm trying to convince them to let me get through the border.

The guy nods his head. We are so many to do this. We all want to go inside Gaza, but since Monday morning, the access is limited to the humanitarian aid, the ambulances and to the doctors, the nurses and the medics who have the right letter from their embassies or their Egyptian organization.

Outside o... [Extend]

21 min (for Al-Jazeera International)

A Film by Laila El-Haddad and Saeed Taji Farouky

When Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, the city of Rafah was suddenly split, between Egypt and Gaza, by an immense metal and concrete wall. Families found themselves divided by a high-security international border, though their houses often lay less than 100m apart.

Before long, influential families moved their business underground, through dozens of secret tunnels burrowed below the Israeli border fence.

Everything moves through Rafah’s tunnels: from cigarettes and drugs to cash and people. It is a vast enterprise, and pays five times an average annual Gaza salary in one month. It is a family business, passed on from father to son and alw... [Extend]