As we drive through Beit Hanoun on the outskirts of Gaza City we pass a blackened block of buildings with the front blown off, revealing the insides of demolished apartments. The rooms of ruined furniture are visible as if in a dolls house with the door open. I imagine a giant hand reaching in, to crush furniture and snatch people. Just as the shells would have snatched the lives of anyone left inside when they struck. Though Sami explains that most people escaped from this building before it was hit, during the summer's 'Operation Protective Edge'.
Sami worked as a nurse in Al Shifa hospital in Gaza throughout the 51 day war this summer. 'We really saw hell in those days. Sometimes when I shut my eyes at night I still see the children we were trying to treat on the floor, who had no skin left on their bodies which wasn't burned,' Sami tells me.
'You can't imagine what it was like. Bodies everywhere: many on each bed, bodies on the floor, bodies in the doorways, children - everywhere - screaming. And all we did was just save lives. Nothing more. And we had nothing.'
This war is over now but the scars run deep. Gazan children of six years old have experienced three such wars in their lifetime. And these peole are braced for the next. They of anyone in this region understand how fragile and precious is this tiny patch of peacetime. As we pass one pile of rubble in an ordinary street, Sami explains: 'This was the house of an important member of Hamas. His wife and children were killed. We don't know where he is now. It was a nightmare because we didn't know where the shells were going to land next. Nowhere and no one was exempt.'
Many streets we pass have a house taken out, like a mouth with a missing tooth. Many of the strikes must have been calculated within inches.
For Sami, life has become even more of a straight jacket. He can't get cigarettes easily, or his favourite apple tobacco for his shisha pipe. The crossing from Rafah in the South, bordering with Egypt is now closed; the tunnels - formerly the only other way of getting goods in, are smashed. There's barely a flow of anything, let alone people. Since 2007, when Hamas took over Gaza from Fatah, the situation has been in free fall. Sami admits: 'We all voted for Hamas because they were our last hope. We thought they could change things. Now we see the truth. Things have got worse'.
'It's like we're in a bottle with a cork in the top now. All I want is a trip to the West Bank. Just for 2 days in Ramallah - to have a change of scene and decompress. Then I will come back here and I will be able to work with more energy and less stress.'
Donkey carts trot beside us, loaded with fruit. Horse carts clack along weaving in and out of the traffic of ancient cars. We hop out to film a group of young men working with a JCB sorting out the rubble of a bombed building. All that remains is a huge hole, filled with rainwater, encircled with rubble and twisted wires. They smile at us and call: 'Welcome!' as they pull the contorted metal bars from the ruins, and drag them over to the metal straightening machine to use again.
If anything, this admirable recycling job is a pastime for angry young men. I remark on this to Sami. 'But what choice do we have?' he laughs. He's always laughing.
There's been a promise of $5.4 billion to re-re-re-build Gaza, but Sami explains the official building work has not yet begun, and won't do for months, due to the 'Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism' established by the UN and Israel where every rebuild needs to be assessed first. Israel needs to avoid sponsoring a regrouping of Hamas.
Israelis have long barred the entry of basic construction materials such as cement, metal pies and steel in to Gaza, insisting that they are 'dual use' items that Hamas could use to build more underground tunnels. This ban has become more draconian since the summer. And civilians are suffering yet again as a result.
Over 100,000 Gazans are living in temporary accommodation in UNWRA school buildings. And they'll be waiting for at least another 6 months until they can start to build. Men and women are segregated. Families, already smashed, are divided up. Some people are beginning to do the work themselves. 'No building materials are wasted here. It's like gold to us. Everything that can be used again, we use. What other choice do we have?' Sami says - laughing, again, as if the frequency of his laughter might conceal the flatness beneath.
We spend the day filming in the crowded hospital, the white coated doctors ducking and diving through clusters of grey looking patients. Without exception the people are friendly and welcoming. Everyone wants to talk, to tell us how it's been in the summer. At around 4pm Sami drops me at the hotel - a vast structure overlooking the sea with ornate golden lights and swirling carpets. 'We have only 8 hours of electricity a day. This is a timetable we know very well, just as we know the sunrise and the sunset. There's nothing to do here and nowhere to go, so I lose myself in Facebook whenever I have a moment to myself and when there's power,' Sami says before he heads home.
I find my way up to the hotel roof as the call to prayer sweeps over the city from an elegant grey mosque (funded by the Qataris I was told) on one side. I film the cityscape as the sun sinks below the Mediterranean, framing a few tiny fishing boats in silhouette. Children playing below prank about doing backflips down sandbanks, and a line of military cadets dressed in black jog in a line along the road. The sun sinks below the blue, and the only lights around me emanate from the hotel - its huge generator rumbling loudly below.
I go for dinner with some of the doctors. Muneer the owner of the fish restaurant greets us. His is yet another friendly, moustached face with twinkling eyes. He names each of the fish spread out on the icy bed at the entrance.
Then he chooses a selection for us and we sit in an underground room painted blue with assorted shells hanging in fishing nets. He arrives shortly with small bowls of spicy shell fish soup and some warm flat bread; then comes a huge pile of grilled fish, hummus and cucumber and tomato salad. As I pick with my fork, one of the doctors tells me he learned during his training in Ukraine: 'that fish, chicken and women should be taken with the hands,' encouraging me to lose the fork. It's much easier. The food is delicious. Over coffee and cigarettes Muneer comes to join us and I try to follow their conversation in Arabic. They help me fill in the gaps when required.
During the 51 days of war in the summer, Muneer sheltered over 100 people in the underground dining room where we're sitting. They were mostly members of his extended family who'd escaped from the shelling in the area of Shujaiya, the area in Gaza City that was worst hit.
'We had so many orphans in here who'd lost their parents, and we were all trying to look after them and find any of their relations who might still be alive. All our gardens were badly hit, so during this time we couldn't find parsley or lemon or even basic things like tomatoes to eat,' Muneer explains, puffing smoke from his nostrils.
It's increasingly difficult for him to work as there's hardly any power. What used to come cheap from Egypt is no longer coming. Israel has not permitted Gazans to fish beyond 6 miles from the coast since 2006. Often this distance is reduced to 3 miles. Anyone who crosses the line risks death. But like every Gazan I meet, Muneer smiles and laughs a lot, but I also wonder what us below this mask of warmth. They're a nation under siege. How can anything or anyone be 'normal.'
On our way back to the hotel we see what we think are children swimming in a puddle. 'You should take a picture!' says one of the doctors. As we draw closer we see the nocturnal swimmers are army cadets in training. 'The Gazan army?' I ask. 'Well, yes. Hamas army.' I put my camera away and keep my head low as we splash past in a shallower part of the same puddle.
The next morning I set out with Sami at 6.30am. 'It's an institutionalised siege,' Sami tells me, 'because everyone plays a part in it. Not just Israel, who are denying us all our rights and the flow of essential goods, even when they aren't bombing us. But the UN is part of the siege through its bureaucracy with everything, and making us wait for so long before we can officially begin to build. It comes from every side. And to the other side - well, at least we still have the sea.'
We interview one of the most senior doctors in Gaza, who also plays a pivotal role in politics here. Though he's officially with Fatah, Hamas need his influence as he's connected and respected. He is open minded and full of information. He and his wife live here, though his children study in Egypt. They can't come to visit him in Gaza, but they occasionally have fleeting time together in the West Bank.
He looks out of his surgery window as he describes his medical training in Edinburgh and a much enjoyed trip to the highlands. 'I think there's a big connection between the Palestinians and the Scottish,' he smiles. 'We all know what it is like to have a bigger and more powerful neighbour, and it effects who we are as a nation.'
Sami lays out a breakfast of hummus, za'atar (the Palestinian thyme and sesame seasoning) and warm flat bread before we set out for Shujayiya, one of the districts most damaged this summer. The senior doctor has arranged for us to have a tour by the mukhtar - town elder of that area. He drops us by the Islamic University and we drive on with the mukhtar and his driver - both decked in clean white 'keffiyeh' head dresses and the black rope around the top.
You can't tell from his face that he's the elder of a suburb that's been all but flattened. I'm always intrigued by the facade of a human face.
The crumbled facade of his district of Shujayiya is more revealing.
Sami worked as a nurse in Al Shifa hospital in Gaza throughout the 51 day war this summer. 'We really saw hell in those days. Sometimes when I shut my eyes at night I still see the children we were trying to treat on the floor, who had no skin left on their bodies which wasn't burned,' Sami tells me.
'You can't imagine what it was like. Bodies everywhere: many on each bed, bodies on the floor, bodies in the doorways, children - everywhere - screaming. And all we did was just save lives. Nothing more. And we had nothing.'
This war is over now but the scars run deep. Gazan children of six years old have experienced three such wars in their lifetime. And these peole are braced for the next. They of anyone in this region understand how fragile and precious is this tiny patch of peacetime. As we pass one pile of rubble in an ordinary street, Sami explains: 'This was the house of an important member of Hamas. His wife and children were killed. We don't know where he is now. It was a nightmare because we didn't know where the shells were going to land next. Nowhere and no one was exempt.'
Many streets we pass have a house taken out, like a mouth with a missing tooth. Many of the strikes must have been calculated within inches.
For Sami, life has become even more of a straight jacket. He can't get cigarettes easily, or his favourite apple tobacco for his shisha pipe. The crossing from Rafah in the South, bordering with Egypt is now closed; the tunnels - formerly the only other way of getting goods in, are smashed. There's barely a flow of anything, let alone people. Since 2007, when Hamas took over Gaza from Fatah, the situation has been in free fall. Sami admits: 'We all voted for Hamas because they were our last hope. We thought they could change things. Now we see the truth. Things have got worse'.
'It's like we're in a bottle with a cork in the top now. All I want is a trip to the West Bank. Just for 2 days in Ramallah - to have a change of scene and decompress. Then I will come back here and I will be able to work with more energy and less stress.'
Donkey carts trot beside us, loaded with fruit. Horse carts clack along weaving in and out of the traffic of ancient cars. We hop out to film a group of young men working with a JCB sorting out the rubble of a bombed building. All that remains is a huge hole, filled with rainwater, encircled with rubble and twisted wires. They smile at us and call: 'Welcome!' as they pull the contorted metal bars from the ruins, and drag them over to the metal straightening machine to use again.
If anything, this admirable recycling job is a pastime for angry young men. I remark on this to Sami. 'But what choice do we have?' he laughs. He's always laughing.
There's been a promise of $5.4 billion to re-re-re-build Gaza, but Sami explains the official building work has not yet begun, and won't do for months, due to the 'Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism' established by the UN and Israel where every rebuild needs to be assessed first. Israel needs to avoid sponsoring a regrouping of Hamas.
Israelis have long barred the entry of basic construction materials such as cement, metal pies and steel in to Gaza, insisting that they are 'dual use' items that Hamas could use to build more underground tunnels. This ban has become more draconian since the summer. And civilians are suffering yet again as a result.
Over 100,000 Gazans are living in temporary accommodation in UNWRA school buildings. And they'll be waiting for at least another 6 months until they can start to build. Men and women are segregated. Families, already smashed, are divided up. Some people are beginning to do the work themselves. 'No building materials are wasted here. It's like gold to us. Everything that can be used again, we use. What other choice do we have?' Sami says - laughing, again, as if the frequency of his laughter might conceal the flatness beneath.
We spend the day filming in the crowded hospital, the white coated doctors ducking and diving through clusters of grey looking patients. Without exception the people are friendly and welcoming. Everyone wants to talk, to tell us how it's been in the summer. At around 4pm Sami drops me at the hotel - a vast structure overlooking the sea with ornate golden lights and swirling carpets. 'We have only 8 hours of electricity a day. This is a timetable we know very well, just as we know the sunrise and the sunset. There's nothing to do here and nowhere to go, so I lose myself in Facebook whenever I have a moment to myself and when there's power,' Sami says before he heads home.
I find my way up to the hotel roof as the call to prayer sweeps over the city from an elegant grey mosque (funded by the Qataris I was told) on one side. I film the cityscape as the sun sinks below the Mediterranean, framing a few tiny fishing boats in silhouette. Children playing below prank about doing backflips down sandbanks, and a line of military cadets dressed in black jog in a line along the road. The sun sinks below the blue, and the only lights around me emanate from the hotel - its huge generator rumbling loudly below.
I go for dinner with some of the doctors. Muneer the owner of the fish restaurant greets us. His is yet another friendly, moustached face with twinkling eyes. He names each of the fish spread out on the icy bed at the entrance.
Then he chooses a selection for us and we sit in an underground room painted blue with assorted shells hanging in fishing nets. He arrives shortly with small bowls of spicy shell fish soup and some warm flat bread; then comes a huge pile of grilled fish, hummus and cucumber and tomato salad. As I pick with my fork, one of the doctors tells me he learned during his training in Ukraine: 'that fish, chicken and women should be taken with the hands,' encouraging me to lose the fork. It's much easier. The food is delicious. Over coffee and cigarettes Muneer comes to join us and I try to follow their conversation in Arabic. They help me fill in the gaps when required.
During the 51 days of war in the summer, Muneer sheltered over 100 people in the underground dining room where we're sitting. They were mostly members of his extended family who'd escaped from the shelling in the area of Shujaiya, the area in Gaza City that was worst hit.
'We had so many orphans in here who'd lost their parents, and we were all trying to look after them and find any of their relations who might still be alive. All our gardens were badly hit, so during this time we couldn't find parsley or lemon or even basic things like tomatoes to eat,' Muneer explains, puffing smoke from his nostrils.
It's increasingly difficult for him to work as there's hardly any power. What used to come cheap from Egypt is no longer coming. Israel has not permitted Gazans to fish beyond 6 miles from the coast since 2006. Often this distance is reduced to 3 miles. Anyone who crosses the line risks death. But like every Gazan I meet, Muneer smiles and laughs a lot, but I also wonder what us below this mask of warmth. They're a nation under siege. How can anything or anyone be 'normal.'
On our way back to the hotel we see what we think are children swimming in a puddle. 'You should take a picture!' says one of the doctors. As we draw closer we see the nocturnal swimmers are army cadets in training. 'The Gazan army?' I ask. 'Well, yes. Hamas army.' I put my camera away and keep my head low as we splash past in a shallower part of the same puddle.
The next morning I set out with Sami at 6.30am. 'It's an institutionalised siege,' Sami tells me, 'because everyone plays a part in it. Not just Israel, who are denying us all our rights and the flow of essential goods, even when they aren't bombing us. But the UN is part of the siege through its bureaucracy with everything, and making us wait for so long before we can officially begin to build. It comes from every side. And to the other side - well, at least we still have the sea.'
We interview one of the most senior doctors in Gaza, who also plays a pivotal role in politics here. Though he's officially with Fatah, Hamas need his influence as he's connected and respected. He is open minded and full of information. He and his wife live here, though his children study in Egypt. They can't come to visit him in Gaza, but they occasionally have fleeting time together in the West Bank.
He looks out of his surgery window as he describes his medical training in Edinburgh and a much enjoyed trip to the highlands. 'I think there's a big connection between the Palestinians and the Scottish,' he smiles. 'We all know what it is like to have a bigger and more powerful neighbour, and it effects who we are as a nation.'
Sami lays out a breakfast of hummus, za'atar (the Palestinian thyme and sesame seasoning) and warm flat bread before we set out for Shujayiya, one of the districts most damaged this summer. The senior doctor has arranged for us to have a tour by the mukhtar - town elder of that area. He drops us by the Islamic University and we drive on with the mukhtar and his driver - both decked in clean white 'keffiyeh' head dresses and the black rope around the top.
You can't tell from his face that he's the elder of a suburb that's been all but flattened. I'm always intrigued by the facade of a human face.
The crumbled facade of his district of Shujayiya is more revealing.
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