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]

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]

(41min/Palestine/Dir:Abdalsalam M.A Shehada/Prod:Ramatan Studies Company)
"Hearing is not like seeing and seeing is different from living the experience," reflects Shehada's mother about life in Rafah. And for a week in May 2004, that experience worsened as Israeli forces pushed forward with "Operation Rainbow," killing 45 Palestinians, 38 of them civilians including nine children. "The only thing we can do is pray to God."

This overwhelmingly distraught sentiment runs throughout Shehada's newest documentary Rainbow (2004), which examines first hand the devastating effects of the events of May 13-May 20th. However, this film is not a documentary in the traditional sense -- from the perspective of an outsider looking in. Rainbow is as ... [Extend]

Rafah, a landscape scarred by Israel's war. Even in the darkness, we could see the piles of rubble: one had been the police station, destroyed in the heavy bombing on the first day of Israel's offensive, killing 22 Hamas policemen; another pile accounted for the houses that had been destroyed around Muntasa, a favoured children's play area and park which the Israelis say militants had used for firing rockets – residents deny the claim. The park is no more, a field of smashed masonry and concrete.

Rafah, the southernmost city of Gaza, probably suffered more than any other from the eight long years of conflict before the start of Operation Cast Lead but even on the short journey here from the Egyptian border, some of the new devastation visited on the area and... [Extend]

22 Jan 08 [Extend]

ISM report [Extend]

Interview Fida Qishta, Rafah, Gaza, 2 January 2009, 11 p m [Extend]

Interview Fida Qishta, Rafah [Extend]

A lo largo de los últimos 20 años se han abierto túneles entre las fronteras más calientes del planeta. Por ejemplo, entre México y Estados Unidos: tras la gran operación iniciada en 1994 para levantar un poderoso dique a la inmigración mexicana hacia el gran vecino del norte, se han descubierto alrededor de 70 túneles a lo largo de esa frontera. Otro ejemplo: los sótanos de la franja de Gaza, perforados por multitud de túneles a lo largo de la frontera con Egipto, ahora bombardeados por la aviación israelí. Y un tercero: los boat peoples que se lanzan incansables desde las costas africanas hacia Canarias, el sur de Italia y Grecia. La proliferación de tecnologías contra el paso ilegal de las ... [Extend]

An activist group says it will send a boat with doctors and medical aid to Gaza this weekend, despite the Israeli blockade.
The Free Gaza movement said Wednesday that the Greek-flagged Arion will leave the Cypriot port of Larnaca Saturday with 30 passengers and more than three tons of aid.
Last week, Israeli forces prevented a similar mission from reaching Gaza during the 12th day of the operation in Gaza. Free Gaza says the Israeli navy rammed and heavily damaged the SS Dignity, while Israel maintains the boat tried to outmaneuver a navy vessel and crashed into it.
Free Gaza has made five boat deliveries of aid to Gaza since August, defying the blockade Israel imposed when Hamas won control of the territory in 2007 [Extend]