[IsraelTimes] KHAN YOUNIS — I am inside the Gaza Strip. Although the APC has been traveling westward for several minutes, I am still unable to spot any familiar sites here. It's been seven years since I last visited Smaller Ibsen, a quiet suburb of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, as a journalist, before Israeli authorities forbade us from entering.
Today, those authorities are the host. The IDF Spokesperson's Unit agreed to bring a group of journalists on a tour of combat sites, primarily, it appears, to give us a sense of Hamas's tunnel-building project. Instead of Ashraf, the driver of the yellow taxi who would wait for me on the Gaza side of the Erez crossing, this time it's the APC driver who is taking me in.
During these seven lean years, I had to make do with conversations with my Gazan friends in order to gain the slightest idea of what was happening in the Strip. I understood that this place, as extremist and poor as it was in 2006, had become only more extremist and poor. Hamastan. |