Uriel Sinai, Haaretz, Getty Images, סדרות (Go to second gallery)

The city of Sderot and the communities of the Gaza envelope have been marked by Palestinian terrorist groups from Gaza as the prime goal for attack by Qassam missiles. In the last year, an average of five Qassam rockets have been launched over Sderot every day, and force the residents of the area to live in constant fear of the next “code red” alarm.
August 2007
Digital photo, converted to black and white

A Palestinian farmer waiting at the West Bank Barrier gate separating him from his olive groves located behind the Barrier, in the area of Ariel settlement.
©ICRC/E. Linklater/il-e-01265

Palestinians queuing at Huwara checkpoint, one of the two entry passages along the main road connecting Nablus to the rest of the West Bank. Private vehicles are not allowed through this check point, unless the owner holds a special permit.
©Associated Press/N. Ishtayeh

A Palestinian family crosses Huwara checkpoint, one of the two entry passages along the main road connecting Nablus to the rest of the West Bank. Private vehicles are not allowed through this check point, unless the owner holds a special permit.
©Associated Press / M. Mohammed

ICRC, The occupied Palestinian territories: Dignity Denied, December 13, 2007

“To be a Palestinian means to face limits in every aspect of life. We are blocked everywhere: we lose our jobs, we cannot travel freely, we are separated from our families. To be a Palestinian means to be deprived of many things that to others are normal.”
Mohammed, a Jerusalemite

Throughout the occupied Palestinian territories, in the Gaza Strip as well as in the West Bank, Palestinians continuously face hardship in simply going about their lives; they are prevented from doing what makes up the daily fabric of most people’s existence. The Palestinian territories face a deep human crisis, where millions of people are denied their human dignity. Not once in a while, but every day.

While the Gaza Strip is sealed off, the conflict between militants and Israel continues inexorably. Palestinian militants are launching rockets towards Israel almost every day. The Israeli army regularly carries out incursions deep into the Strip, air strikes and attacks from the sea. The civilian population remains trapped, with no escape possible, and is also affected by continued intra-Palestinian clashes.

St. Peter’s Square, Rome 1954, Bettman Corbis Photo

Source: http://www.nytstore.com/ProdDetail.aspx?prodId=16169

Bosnia, 1993 - Mourning a soldier killed in the civil war

Bosnia,1993 - Mourning a soldier killed by Serbs and buried in what was once a football field

Chechnya, 1996 - Ruins of central Grozny

Chechnya, 1995 - Pallbearers came for a woman’ s husband, who was killed by the Russian army.

Source: http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/

One of a series of photos by Francine Orr presented in Flash sequence with narration

Francine Orr, Horror in Uganda - Los Angeles Times, June 5, 2005

The Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, has been terrorizing villagers. It kidnaps adults to haul heavy loads over long distances. But it also steals children, some as young as 8. The LRA forces the boys to become soldiers; the girls become sex slaves.

It also compels its victims to victimize others. Reports abound of youngsters torturing or killing peers who had tried to escape or displeased their captors. Hundreds of youths have shared details of their ordeals with aid workers who have set up live-in trauma counseling centers.

The LRA is led by Joseph Kony, who claims to be acting under divine instruction. It says it is fighting for political recognition, and it denies brutality toward civilians. In one day last month, however, the rebels hacked at least 16 people to death with the victims’ own farming tools. The government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has tried to conduct negotiations with Korny, but there have been no firm results. Officials say that Kony is nothing more than a bandit and that it would be out of the question to give him either amnesty or a political office.

So the cruelty persists. International aid groups estimate that 30,000 children have been abducted in the slow-burning conflict. Although hundreds have escaped, they rarely find peace.

Villages across northern Uganda have been uprooted. The former residents languish in camps, which are cramped and unsanitary. Food, clean water and medical care are scarce. Malnutrition and diseases such as malaria, scabies and tuberculosis afflict many. Those who leave camp to look for work, firewood or edible plants risk being attacked by the rebels, captured in shootouts or blown up by mines that litter the landscape. The rebels often storm the camps to loot supplies and kidnap more victims.

Dancers at Cosmos club in the West Bank.

Credit: Katherine Kiviat

Nissenbaum Blog: Checkpoint Jerusalem, November 26, 2007

Ladies up in here tonight
No fighting, no fighting
We got the refugees up in here
No fighting, no fighting
- Shakira, featuring Wyclef Jean, “Hips Don’t Lie”

In theory, the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank are brothers and sisters with the 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

In reality, the gap between the two has probably never been wider.

Most Palestinians who live in the West Bank have never been to Gaza, and most Palestinians in Gaza have never been to the West Bank.

Gaza, now under Hamas control, is substantially more conservative than the West Bank.

That reality hit home Saturday night around 2 a.m. while grooving to Shakira on the dance floor at Cosmos, the West Bank’s only real disco.

The dance floor was packed. Women in short leopard-skin mini skirts and thigh-high leather boots with spiked heels were doing the shimmy-and-shake with their partners as strobe lights and smoke swept across the club. Two, young, thin gay Palestinians with spiked punk rock-style hair and matching black t-shirts felt free enough to get their groove on on the dance floor.

The DJ unartfully careened from Shakira to classic Egyptian dance tunes to Nancy Ajram to cheesy American disco classics, but no one really seemed to mind.

The bar served up a steady stream of vodka and Red Bull, Taybeh (the only Palestinian beer), and a traditional selection of cocktails.Cosmos

You see this across the Middle East in places like Beirut and Dubai. But not so much here in the West Bank. And certainly not these days in the Gaza Strip.

Being at Cosmos 48 hours after attending a sparsely-attended rap show in Gaza City made me acutely aware of the growing psychological gap between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The chances for couples to dance together in Gaza are virtually nil. And forget about serving alcohol. There are no restaurants in Gaza that serve booze and even those that serve non-alcoholic beer sometimes get stern looks from customers who think it’s really the Devil’s Brew.

The rift between the West Bank and Gaza has become more pronounced in the nearly six months since Hamas seized control of Gaza.

Scores of Palestinians, the few allowed out by Israel, fled to the West Bank where they became refugees again in their own nation.

Many were scorned as traitors or cowards for fleeing. Others from Gaza were shocked by the sight of Palestinian girls dressed in tight jeans and pink DKNY tops seen shopping every day in downtown Ramallah.

On the eve of Annapolis, Gaza remains under effective lock-down. And there is little reason to believe that things will get better after the peace conference.

If Annapolis leads to ongoing peace talks, there will be no incentive for PA President Mahmoud Abbas to renew talks with Hamas and create a new unity government - a move that would no doubt scuttle negotiations with Israel.

If Hamas decides to renew attacks on Israel after Annapolis, Israel is certain to respond with overpowering force in Gaza that would probably have at least the tacit backing from Abbas.

In a few days, Israel is planning to turn the screws again on Gaza by rationing power - a move widely viewed as a violation of international law.

“This is our life,” a friend of mine in Gaza told me last week. “Your life was better than your father’s, and your father’s life was better than his father’s life, yes? Here, my father’s life was better than mine, and my life will be better than my son’s.”

A man suspected of Mahdi Army activity is detained during a recent raid in Baghdad. General David Petraeus has singled out Ghazaliya,a mostly Sunni district in the western part of the city, as an area where the military has made progress. Photograph by Johan Spanner.

Letter from Iraq: Inside the Surge: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2007

Joint Security Station Thrasher, in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, is housed in a Saddam-era mansion with twenty-foot columns and a fountain, now dry, that looks like a layer cake of concrete and limestone. The mansion and two adjacent houses have been surrounded by blast walls. J.S.S. Thrasher was set up last March, and is part of the surge in troops engineered by General David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq. Moving units out of large bases and into Joint Security Stations—small outposts in Baghdad’s most dangerous districts—has been crucial to Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy, and Thrasher is now home to a hundred American soldiers and a few hundred Iraqis. This fall, on the roof of the mansion, amid sandbags, communications gear, and exercise equipment protected by a sniper awning, Captain Jon Brooks, Thrasher’s commander, pointed out some of the local landmarks. “This site was selected because it was the main body drop in Ghazaliya,” he said, indicating a grassy area nearby. “There were up to eleven bodies a week. Most were brutally mutilated.”

The Mother of All Battles Mosque, with its unmistakable phalanx of minarets shaped like Scud missiles, is nearby. Saddam Hussein hid in Ghazaliya during the American bombing in the first Gulf War, and built the mosque to show his gratitude to the neighborhood. (“Ghazaliya used to have—still does—a lot of retired Saddam military people,” Brooks said.) In April, 2004, wounded gunmen taking part in the battle for Falluja took refuge in the mosque. Ghazaliya borders the eastern edge of Anbar province, the center of the Sunni insurgency, and it became a strategic gateway to Baghdad for insurgents and foreign jihadis. On a previous visit to Ghazaliya, in December, 2003, I had met insurgents at a safe house in the neighborhood. They told me that they were intent on killing Americans. Since those days, with few exceptions, Ghazaliya had been a no-go area for Westerners, including journalists, who ran the risk of being kidnapped and killed. American patrols in Ghazaliya were regularly ambushed.

AMONA, West Bank/Feb. 2006
A Jewish settler struggles with an Israeli security officer as authorities evacuate a West Bank settlement near the Palestinian town of Ramallah after Israel’s Supreme Court cleared the way for the demolition of nine homes at the site. This photo won first prize in The World Press Photo awards. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Teibel, Subject of AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo says God on her side, ap, 4/19/07

AMONA, West Bank (AP) — The photo caught the world’s attention: a lone 15-year-old girl holding back a wall of riot police moving in to demolish Jewish homes illegally erected in the West Bank.

Speaking for the first time since The Associated Press image won a Pulitzer prize this week, the girl, who would identify herself only as Nili, said God was on her side during the confrontation.

“In the photo you see me — one person as it were — against many. But that’s only an illusion,” said Nili, now two weeks shy of her 17th birthday, as she stood amid the ruins of the nine homes demolished in Amona in February 2006.

“Behind the many stood one man — (Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert,” who ordered the demolition. “Behind me stood the Lord Blessed Be He, and the people of Israel.”

Nili, a shy, gangly teen born in Israel to American parents, was one of several thousand Jewish protesters who barricaded themselves behind barbed wire and on rooftoops in an unsuccessful effort to keep club-wielding riot troops from demolishing the homes built on private Palestinian land.

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

The people in this picture no longer belong to the Klan. The man has died and the two women are now active in their church.

2005 Pulitzer Prizes-BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY, Works

Najaf - U.S. soldiers take cover in a fortified position after a second week of fighting against Shiite militiamen in the holy city. (Photo by Jim MacMillan, August 20. 2004.)

Baghdad - The mother of Samah Hussein grieves over the body at a Baghdad morgue. The boy was among 12 people reportedly killed by a suicide car bombing outside the U.S. military’s Camp Cuervo. (Photo by Samir Mizban, June 13, 2004.)

Baghdad - Mohammed Saleem, 18 months, lies in a coffin at a Sadr City morgue. Relatives said the boy and four other family members were killed in their car when U.S. forces opened fire overnight. (Photo by Karim Kadim, June 6, 2004)

A Palestinian farmer feeds carnations to sheep at his farm in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip (AP).

Israel okays renewal of flower, strawberry exports from Gaza,

Haaretz, Nov. 21, 2007

The government has decided to permit the renewal of flower and strawberry exports from the Gaza Strip to Europe from agricultural export terminals inside Israel.

Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, both of Labor, approved the move after Palestinian farmers and Israeli exporters appealed to the High Court of Justice against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Simchon and Barak.

The exports came to a halt after the security cabinet declared the Gaza Strip a ‘hostile entity’ in response to ongoing militant Qassam fire on the western Negev.

Simchon is to send the details of the decision to Palestinian Authority Agriculture Minister Mahmoud Habash.

The export of flowers and strawberries from the Gaza Strip to the European Union is carried out with the cooperation of Israeli exporters and European buyers, and amounts to roughly NIS 100 million each year. Of that sum, NIS 45 million comes from the sale of carnations.