The first time I went to Gaza in 2010 I was briefed by the head of security at the NGO hosting me there on what to expect from the crossing. The blockade had only been in place three years and the dehumanising process involved was still novel. The briefing took over an hour and was more or less accurate to my experience.
Erez Crossing is a huge, dystopian fortress that is Israel’s only civilian entry into Gaza, he said. It is an unmanned military complex. You won’t meet anyone inside, but its personnel will be watching you from behind the glass window of their high control centre, communicating through a speaker system, controlling the turnstiles and concrete sliding doors, funnelling you through a warren of high-walled tunnels, following signs “To Gaza”.
It’s often a long wait for that last huge wall to clunk open. When it does, you will be ejected down the lonely kilometre of caged pathway, through the apocalypse-scape of the borderlands to the way too narrow turnstile at the 5-5 (hamza-hamza) checkpoint, run by the Palestinian Authority because Israel won’t coordinate with Hamas. Someone from the NGO will be waiting to drive you on to the Hamas checkpoint where your belongings will be checked for illegal alcohol and drugs. Then, hopefully, you’ll be allowed into the upside-down otherworld of the Gaza Strip, powered by diesel-chugging generators, where donkey carts outnumber cars, the sky hums with surveillance drones and the breeze is scented with sewage.
By the time I arrived, British editors and news consumers were weary of Palestine – Gaza in particular. It was compared to Northern Ireland: intractable, complicated and always troublesome. Unless there was a violent flare-up in the conflict – a war over homelands that’s raged since 1948 – the 1.5m people living in this unpopular piece of the Middle East when Hamas took control of it in 2007 were penned in and largely ignored. The outside world had accepted the unthinkable reality of an entire population being blockaded indefinitely and Gaza went on as best it could.
I diligently washed my vegetables contaminated with white phosphorus dropped during the last war
A huge rebuilding effort was underway. Donkey carts pulled the rubble of buildings destroyed in the 2008 war, what Israel called Operation Cast Lead, to be crushed and reborn as new construction. There seemed to be no traffic rules. There was an old city built in the fancy style of the Mamluks that looked just like I’d hoped Jerusalem would, but didn’t. It had a hammam, in business for a thousand years. Then there was the sea. Where else in the Mediterranean would you get mile after mile of unspoilt coastline? If only it weren’t for the horizon of Israeli naval ships and 80 million litres of raw sewage leaked daily from bombed treatment plants.
The Israeli Government Press Office had not yet recognised my credentials as a journalist. Without an Israeli press card, it’s almost impossible to get permission to enter the Gaza Strip but, thanks to this NGO, I had secured a single-entry visa. Given the difficulty of getting in, I stayed more than a month in the NGO’s staff apartment. I diligently washed from my vegetables the earth contaminated with white phosphorus dropped during the last war. I almost blew up the kitchen trying to operate the oven. The kids playing football in the sandy streets helped me identify the types of rockets fired by militants according to their sound. I was taught how to make musakhan by a new friend, whom I was later warned to avoid because in her youth she may or may not have been groomed as a suicide bomber. Small communities will gossip. I went to the hammam. I got quite sick from generator fumes.
There was no lack of stories. There were medical shortages. People with cancer needed Israeli permission to leave Gaza for treatment. If the permission was late or refused, they often just died. There were food shortages and malnourished people. A millionaire with a huge cactus collection had opened an archaeological museum. Children suffered PTSD from the 2008 war, in which 1,400 Palestinians had died. They were most disturbed, experts told me, not by the bombing but seeing their parents scared for their lives. That’s unless they’d seen their parents actually killed. There was the woman still mourning the donkey she had found executed after the Israeli troops withdrew. She wanted to know why they had to shoot it so many times.
Later, as a stringer for the Daily Telegraph, I got the Israeli press accreditation that meant I could cross the border freely and I did, but for shorter stays. As my career advanced, so did my accommodation. I now stayed in large sea-fronted rooms at the beautiful Al Deira hotel with all the other foreign correspondents. I liked chatting to the funny hotel owner who had opened his doors in 2000 during the post Oslo Accords high, hoping for a tourist boom. Instead, the Second Intifada broke out and his suites only hosted UN diplomats, NGO bosses and journalists.
The lucky patients arrived already dead
I made local friends. The businessman who had been a big deal in the Yasser Arafat days, struggling to get his new bakery venture off the ground, who begged me to smuggle him in whisky. The British owner of a beauty salon who wanted rusks for her grandkids. The local journalist I always worked with who got me over to his home so I could eat proper food with his kids and wife, an exceptional cook.
Gaza became my thing. I liked to insist on how much I preferred it to the West Bank. It has a totally different character, I’d say. It’s a seaside town. The food is spicier. Its borders are sealed, yes; it’s governed by Hamas who torture kids for wearing skinny jeans, yes; it’s polluted and often bombed, yes; but at least it’s Palestinian-run. There isn’t the grinding humiliation of life under Israeli military rule like everywhere but a few patches of the West Bank. It turns out you can fetishise anywhere you’re free to leave, and I was always happy to leave. Erez Crossing is 50 minutes’ drive from Tel Aviv, with its amazing restaurants and bars. It felt weird but I told myself I deserved a night out after time in Gaza.
On 14 November 2012, I crossed over for the night to interview a Hamas official because something felt off. I packed a change of knickers and a spare shirt. That afternoon, Hamas chief of staff Ahmad al-Jabari was assassinated. I stayed in Gaza for more than two weeks and my first war, which the Israeli military declared was Operation Pillar of Defence. For the first time since 2007 they let foreign journalists stay and watch. We transformed the Al Deira’s lobby into a newsroom.
Every day inevitably ended at al-Shifa hospital, smelling the dead before you could count them. Overwhelmed doctors warning that their generators were out of fuel. That anaesthetics and antiseptics were running out. The lucky patients arrived already dead, they said. Waiters at the Al Deira took coffee orders from the New York Times, El País, the Guardian and the Telegraph as we filed our reports. Network news crews ordered fries and prepared for their stand-ups, which they performed in their flak jackets and helmets directly outside the hotel lobby. An American correspondent laughed on discovering a British colleague crying as she wrote copy about a man who had lost his wife, children and grandchildren in an airstrike. It’s not cool for journalists to cry. How can you be impartial and crying?
The war ended after only eight days and 174 Palestinian deaths; buildings rebuilt after the 2008 war were in ruins again. I stayed on a bit to report the aftermath. I’d been working with a young female journalist and, when she wasn’t available, a perfume maker who happened to speak excellent English. When I got to the crossing, I cried saying goodbye to them. For a few weeks we had been a family, until I wanted to leave.
I returned to London in 2014 for a staff job at the Guardian. Soon into my time as an editor on the foreign desk, another war broke out in Gaza and I watched from afar 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza killed over seven weeks. The destruction was even greater this time. I started reporting again and went back to Palestine twice in 2015, remembering each time why I had left. The strip-searching interrogations at Ben Gurion airport. Having to interact with an impossible occupation that was spreading and deepening as the world rolled its eyes. The fear growing in Israel. I liked being in Gaza, staying at the Al Deira, seeing my friends, but not for too long.
In 2017 I went to do a piece about people in Gaza who collaborate with Israeli intelligence agencies. Hamas usually executes them. The American TV news executive I was working with told me to try to get an execution on camera otherwise we’d just have another story about “another sad Mohammed”. I didn’t ask if they meant Palestinians or Muslims in general. I last went in 2018 for a report about Gaza’s emergency services preparing for the inevitable next war with broken equipment. When I flew out of Ben Gurion, I didn’t want to go back and I haven’t.
I left the Guardian and now live in Greece. It was warm and summery here on 7 October when I heard about the Hamas terror attacks but my blood ran cold. It is possible to be stunned with horror by those attacks, grieve the 859 Israeli civilians killed, ache for the families of the 240 kidnapped, and still be sick with fear for the retribution that’s coming. I knew that the extreme brutality enacted on Israeli civilians by Hamas meant Gaza would be annihilated; we had watched the rehearsals for over a decade.
There is a saying in among expat journalists in Jerusalem: the first year here you hate Israel, the second year you hate Palestine, the third year you hate yourself. Most then leave saying the news cycle is too demoralising: “tensions escalate”, Hamas launches an attack on Israel, Israel responds by razing sections of Gaza – it’s what Israeli analysts call “mowing the lawn”. For sixteen years, doctors and mothers warned us this couldn’t go on. Hospitals are running out of fuel and medicine, too many children are dying. People don’t have enough food. The men, women and children who haven’t been killed are losing their minds to trauma. Some of these warnings were published but people didn’t pay too much attention. Maybe it was too complicated. Maybe they didn’t want to hear from another sad Mohammed.
Now it’s happened, Gaza’s hospitals have run out of fuel. In just a few weeks, more than 13,000 people have been killed, hundreds of thousands made homeless and those that have survived are starving. Gaza City has been flattened, al-Shifa hospital besieged. Millions have marched in London and capitals across the world calling for a ceasefire but their governments, the world’s leading democracies, can’t support one while Hamas is still standing. The 2.5m people now stuck in Gaza, who haven’t been able to vote for Hamas or any party at all since the last national election in 2006, will just have to wait.
I don’t know if there’s still an Al Deira hotel. If the Mamluk hammam has survived, or if the millionaire still has his cactus collection. I don’t know if the businessman or the British salon owner are still alive. I read that 42 journalists have been killed and saw the name of at least one I know among the injured. I don’t know if my journalist friend’s home is still standing, I doubt it. I sent him a message offering my flat in Athens for a holiday if he can leave. He responded kindly: Maybe when it’s all over. I didn’t ask what he thinks over will look like.
Phoebe Greenwood is a former assistant editor and foreign correspondent at the Guardian. She has written and broadcast extensively from the Middle East and
the Balkans
