How is life in Gaza?

The region is mired in despair, traumatized by years of Israeli blockade. Nearly 70% of Palestinians struggle with the constant grip of poverty and crippling hunger, while unemployment, a constant specter, exceeds 50%. Most people in Gaza have been relying on aid from Qatar and other Islamic countries to survive, as well as modest lifelines of Western subsidies.

It must be said that here, in the shadow of broken dreams, a generation of youth faces a bleak tomorrow, bound by the harsh shackles of illiteracy and racial prejudice. Brutal restrictions on their departure from their ancestral homeland, Israel, only deepen the source of anti-Israel sentiment. Hamas’s propaganda stories stand in stark contrast to the stories of Jews who live just across the border.

Recent tragedies, such as the tragedy at a concert featuring vulnerable women along the Gaza Strip that tragically claimed 260 souls, only serve to stoke the fire already burning in the hearts of Gaza’s Muslim population.

And now that Israel has cut off food, water and electricity, prison in the Gaza Strip has become a death sentence. Since the Egyptians have said that they are not expecting refugees and the Palestinians do not want to give up even the last piece of their ancestral land, it is clear that fleeing Egypt is also no easy task.