Source: Reference News
News Report on October 9 According to the French news agency on October 8, during the meeting of U.S. President Trump at the White House on October 8, U.S. Secretary of State Rubio temporarily arrived and delivered a handwritten note stating that Israel and Hamas were "very close" to a deal.
The news agency said: “We should get your permission to immediately post the message on the ‘real social’ website and you will be the first to announce the agreement.”
On the evening of 8 AM, U.S. President Trump announced on social media that the Israeli and Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) had agreed on the first phase of the US-mentioned “peace plan”.This means that all Israeli detainees will be released soon, and that the Israeli military will also withdraw to the boundaries agreed by both sides.
Extended reading
"No one is not a refugee"
After a loud noise, the highest building in Gaza City, Al-Gavri Building, collapsed like a cardboard house, and after the gray smoke rolled, residents desperately searched for remains of life in the rubble.
Starting in September 2025, the Israeli Defence Forces launched a new round of ground invasion of Gaza City. Western media said this was a brand new "burned-earth policy" practice, accompanied by the bombing of almost all the remaining buildings in the city.On October 6, local time, Gaza City was still in war and airstrikes while the U.S. President Trump-sponsored Gaza peace process was under way in Cairo, and the latest day's casualties still included Palestinian children.
In Gaza's 4000-year history, the latest destruction was only a flash. During the Roman and Ottoman Empires, Gaza City was a thoroughfare city and a major commercial city at the crossroads of Asian and African civilizations. European travelers in the 19th century said the beauty here was comparable to the French seaside. During the Oslo negotiations in the 1990s, peace advocates around the world said that a self-governing, open Gaza Strip could create "the Singapore of the Middle East."
During the 1930s, when British custodial authorities suppressed Arab uprisings, the first generation of photographers in Gaza City photographed soldiers, chariots, empty streets, collapsed buildings, and crying children.
Gaza then endured the 1948 Zionist War and a brief period of Egyptian control. In 1956, Israeli troops occupied it for the first time. Since 1967, Israel has long occupied and blockaded Gaza, during which time it has experienced a failed peace process. In 2007, Hamas seized power. Before October 2023, 2.3 million residents were huddled in a small space of 365 square kilometers, and the flow of people, supplies and fuel was completely blocked by Israel for a long time. Before this round of "humanitarian crisis seen by the international community" occurred, this was already "the world's largest open-air prison."
"There is no day in Gaza without a humanitarian crisis, and there is no one who is not a refugee." Mohammed Ali Khalidi, an Arab philosopher and chairman of the research committee of the Palestinian Institute in Beirut, told China News Weekly. "After the new round of crisis, Gaza has a new image in my mind: it is a 'concrete desert'". Another Palestinian intellectual described it: "Gaza, where everything you do to live a decent life can suddenly go down the drain."
Gaza on the Mediterranean Sea
The first shadow of the "crossroads"
In 1663, the Arab scholar and traveler Aisha followed a pilgrimage from Mecca to Jerusalem into Gaza City and was impressed by the “large city”’s forests, orange gardens, luxury houses and rich libraries, feeling that the place was cheap and full of fruits.
Ayatollah grew up in the religious center of Morocco, Fiji, a millennial city that has been a Muslim city since its founding. The history of Gaza is completely different. The French traveler Pierre Lotti, who visited Gaza three hundred years later, describes from a Christian perspective that Gaza is the deadly edge between “the land of solitude” and “the land of milk and honey”.
When Gaza was within the territory of the Great Dynasty, it was the “crossroads of the intersection of Asian-African civilizations”. Once the empire collapsed, Gaza was the home of war-torn soldiers. In the 4th century BC, Alexander spent five months here to complete the “last task” of conquering Egypt, and then the massacre. In the 12th to 14th centuries, Gaza was occupied by the Khalifa, the Eastern Crusaders and the Mongolian cavalry. The mosque that buried the prophet’s grandfather was converted to a church and was converted to a mosque.
Only under the Roman and Ottoman rule did Gaza breathe. Rome gave the city six hundred years of prosperity and for the first time included it in the territory of the "Province of Palestine". In 1980, two Gaza-made amphoras were unearthed underground in the Geneva Cathedral in Switzerland, which proved Gaza's position in imperial trade. These bottles are used to hold wine. St. Gregorius, a Gallic historian and bishop of Dour, wrote in the sixth century that the best wine for Mass is the wine of Gaza, and'all bishops should try to purchase it '.
By contrast, Gaza during the late Ottoman Empire was less peaceful. In 1663, on the way to Gaza, Aisha encountered the kidnapping of the Bedouins. At that time, the most important duty of the governor of Gaza, the Ridwan family, was to protect the safety of pilgrims and merchants travelling between the African continent.
According to imperial accounts, in addition to Bedouins, Gaza was also inhabited by Syrians, Arabs, Druzes, Nusairis, Greeks, Armenians, Copts, Turks, and Jews. Their lands and settlements are vaguely intertwined, because the deterioration of security around them keeps gathering towards the center of Gaza City. This has contributed to a more secular and diverse urban life, and also induced ethnic friction.
In the spring of 1894, French officer Pierre Lotti arrived in Gaza. Although the Ottoman Empire was in late decline, compared to Aahilotti, he saw a more prosperous and modern city. He first noticed the lush cactus, fig trees, olive trees, orange trees and rose bushes on both sides of the road, as well as the citizens walking by wearing their respective ethnic costumes. The ubiquitous coral necklaces indicate that this is a coastal city.
There are hundreds of trade and craft industries in the streets, as well as telephone cables from the city center to Cairo and Jerusalem.When the media pioneers of the Islamic world founded the first newspaper in Palestine, its subscribers were mainly from Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Gaza.
"There is a comfortable and modern life here, and a connection with the rest of the world." Lottie concludes at first sight, "This is the Promised Land." Unlike Ayashi, Lottie, the French military officer, apparently believes that the "Promised Land" should be ruled by the "object of gift" of the Bible. In the mosque, he wiped tears at the church ruins left by the Crusades.
Lottie's journey reflects the covet of Western colonists for Gaza. In 1841, the British drew up the first detailed map of Gaza, marking roads, mosques, orchards and farmland. At the same time as Lottie's visit to Gaza, British engineer McBean asked the question: If the Ottoman Empire collapses, how can Britain maximize its benefits? McBean drew a blueprint for "the sun never sets": from Egypt and Palestine to India, a Trans-Asia-Africa Railway will be built, which will also be connected to Europe in the future, and Gaza City will have a stop.
Another group also noticed Gaza. In 1891, the "Jewish Colonial Association" was established in Germany to purchase land and establish settlements in South America and the Middle East to help discriminated and persecuted Jews in Eastern Europe start a new life. With the addition of financial tycoon Edmund Rothschild, the Jewish Colonial Association focused its goals on Palestine. The more than 120,000 acres of land they purchased became the foundation of Israel's state-building.
At that time, there was no clear land ownership in Palestine, only vague customs and traditions. In 1858, the Ottoman Empire promulgated the Land Code and began land registration. However, farmers of all ethnic groups are reluctant to provide their names to the authorities. The main ethnic groups are afraid of conscription, while other ethnic groups are afraid of slaughter. Therefore, people allow the local clan to register the land of the whole village as individual property, but it is still regarded as collective property in the ethnic group. When these lands were traded to Jewish settlers, the dispute over the ownership of the land continues to this day.
When Loti arrived in Gaza, the local governor was struggling with a land dispute in the northernmost town of Gedra. Among the first Jewish settlements, only Gedra was built in the Gaza Administrative Region, and the vast majority of settlements were in Jaffa, north of the Gaza Administrative Region. Rothschild's agents worked hard to build relationships with Arab officials in Jaffa, but could do nothing about Gaza. As a result, Gedra became the site with the most intense conflict with locals among the first settlements, and settlers did not expand deep into the Gaza Strip.
The “prison” form.
On May 14, 1948, the British flag was lowered at the Governor's House in Jerusalem, ending the nearly 30-year era of "British trusteeship of Palestine". Ayad El-Saraj, then 5 years old, was the son of a Gazan-born official in the Trusteeship Government. He quickly understood what "end" meant. In October, before Israeli troops attacked the Arab city of Beersheba, the Eyad family, like most local residents, hurriedly fled to Gaza.
“I remember my mother put the sewing machine in the truck too, and my father shrugged his hand.”Ead recalled later, “Later, my father told me that when they were convinced they could go home in two weeks,” in fact, they lived in Gaza all their lives.
In 1917, the British expedition defeated the Ottoman Empire, betrayed the Arab rebellion alliance's promise, and divided occupied territories with France, establishing an occupation authority in Palestine. In 1922, the International Union "legalised" the colonies under the name of "trustees" until the United Nations adopted a division plan in 1948.
As the "city people" of the Ottoman era, the Gazans were always dissatisfied with the "hosts". This emotion was exhausted after the final battle of the Sakarya River in 1921, after Kathar rescued Turkey. When the news of Kathar's defeat of the European army came to Gaza, the entire city's shops were re-decorated, people lit the towers, raised the Turkish flag, and donated a new nation for this "heritage to the Ottomans." Then a group of representatives from Gaza went to Istanbul, seeking to become part of the new nation. The response they received was: Turkey accepted the status quo after World War I and accepted British "host" Palestine.
At this time, Gaza had already experienced three Gaza wars between Britain and the Ottomans, and the pilgrimage trade route from Cairo and Mecca to Jerusalem was cut off by the new border. Gaza loses its "crossroads" status. By 1930, British planner Holliday wrote the Palestinian Urban Plan, and Gaza was listed as a "barren town requiring attention".
Today’s historians believe that Gaza was integrated into the capitalist world economy in the 19th century, but the custody authorities believe that it was the “Arabic” integration of the Ottoman Empire and must be replaced by a more “civilized” European way.
For example, the way water is measured: Europeans measure it by volume, but Palestinians measure it by time and is shared by multiple families in "days". This is related to the geographical characteristics of uneven distribution of local rainwater and can ensure collective maintenance of water sources. British officials described it as "chaos." They turned "water rights" into a new commodity of exchange, allowing Jewish settlers to use financiers to take water from local farmers.
The British discovered that Jewish settlers were more able to master the "civilization" way because they came from Europe. The irony of history emerged: In an era of anti-Semitism in Europe, European officials in the host country formed a united front with Jewish exiles.
At the same time as the establishment of the occupation authorities, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, abandoning its commitment to support Arab independence and instead supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish elite, who made up the minority of the population, monopolized the senior positions of the trusteeship government, and the British took out geographic data mapped in the 19th century to support the rise of intensive agriculture by Jewish financiers. Gaza's extensive local agricultural economy was eliminated, and local farmers were directly deprived of the opportunity to upgrade and transform.
During World War II, Palestine became Britain's second largest military base in the Middle East. In order to ensure military supplies, a comprehensive rationing system was implemented in Gaza City, and cement was banned for civilian use, resulting in a serious housing shortage. New Western ideas combined with increasingly poor and marginalized life have spawned public movements in Gaza.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, the number of hosted Arab newspapers grew faster than the population grew faster. Gaza City’s cafe culture formed and became a place of political discourse. In April 1936, a massive uprising known as the “Great Palestinian Uprising” occurred, and the host government faced the worst crisis since its establishment.
A series of measures were quickly introduced to copy other colonies. The Collective Punishment Ordinance was promulgated to allow British troops to demolish villages and towns where the attack occurred if they were unable to find the attacker. More common actions are searches and curfews. Searches mean taking men and young people outside the village for centralized custody, often accompanied by torture and beatings. The curfew lasts for 22 hours or even the entire day.
“This is a quick and effective form of punishment, and a punishment that Arabs can understand. House ruins are permanent monuments of punishment,” a British official wrote.In addition, the authorities isolated provinces for the first time by issuing travel permits, and Gaza was the first “open prison.”
"Obviously, the Israeli government's later'borrowing 'was very direct," pointed out Charles Anderson, a historian at Western Washington University. "The most important lesson they absorbed from the British was to use'daily life' as a'weapon 'object."
"The real blockade does not rely on walls"
Eyad El-Sarraj was awakened by the clamor and gunfire. Looking through the window, the streets in the early morning are full of corpses. Immediately, the door was broken open by Israeli soldiers, and 13-year-old Eyad was shot to his waist and taken to the cellar. He was so scared that he peed his pants. It was 1956, the eighth year since the Eyad family moved to Gaza, the first of countless times in his life that he faced death head-on.
After the beginning of the Zionist War in 1948, Gaza was “luckier” than the vast majority of Palestinian cities.Israel’s Father Ben Gurion explained the logic of the war: “Our strategic goal is to destroy the urban communities, which are the most organized and politically conscious part of the Palestinians.”
In this context, Gaza, controlled by Egyptian troops, and Amman, controlled by Jordan, became the destinations of the vast majority of refugees. In Amman, an instantaneous fivefold increase in the population and a drop in relief have established long-standing tensions between Palestinian refugees and the Jordanian government. In Gaza, 60,000 citizens welcomed 200,000 refugees. The streets were crowded with beggars and scattered and crying women and children. In 1950, Israeli intelligence reported: "The refugees in Gaza are doomed to total extinction, and the supplies they bring are being exhausted."
Since then, the Israeli government has determined its "basic policy": a blockade of Gaza. Today, academic circles have various interpretations of the purpose of "blockade of Gaza". Some people think that this is to achieve "maximum control" with "minimum responsibility"; There are also views that this is to use Gaza as a "test enclave" to cut Palestinian territory. The most well-known explanation comes from Harvard researcher Sarah Roy, who believes that Israel is implementing a "de-development" policy in order to ensure that Gaza continues to fall into the abyss of poverty and despair, thus completely losing its ability to resist.
However, the reason for the initial blockade may not be complicated: refugees who could not survive in Gaza sneaked across the line of fire in twos and threes and returned to farms that had been cultivated for generations to collect food. The Israeli military believes that this means that the Palestinians' desire to exercise their "right of return" has not been extinguished. In 1949, the Israeli Southern Command announced that "once a stranger is found on the Gaza border, there is no need to arrest and interrogate, and he will be shot immediately."
On the other hand, the Israeli government is well aware of the hatred that Palestinians fleeing to Gaza bring with them. After reading reports of soldiers smashing children's skulls and raping and killing women during the 1948 war, then Israeli cabinet minister Aharun Zislin told colleagues: "I feel that what is happening hurts my soul … Jews are acting like Nazis." He added that the government must investigate these crimes, but "we must hide it from the public, we shouldn't even reveal that we are investigating".
The blockade is a shortcut to silence, and it is also a way to protect the newly established Israeli citizens from the attack of revenge anger. Middle East policy expert Tariq Bakoni pointed out that in essence, "when Israel promises to provide security for its citizens, it is actually saying it is providing violence." Ariel Sharon, a famous Israeli general, further pointed out that the best way to blockade is to occupy it with the army, divide it with Jewish settlements, and control the supply of all living resources. This became the theoretical basis for Israel's long-term occupation of Gaza, which began in 1967.
Between 1967 and 1990, Jewish settlements, farming areas and surrounding buffering areas gradually occupied 58% of Gaza’s land.The area of farmland owned by the locals was reduced by more than half, and the remaining fields were barely cultivated because the most severe supply and resource constraints were directed at farmers.
The military regulatory order requires a special permit for Gazans to drill wells, which has almost never been granted. On the other hand, Jewish settler drilling does not require any procedures. American sociologist Brian Barber recalls to China Newsweek that in the mid-1990s, when he began to regularly visit Gaza, he saw settlers irrigate roses in small gardens with water, while local villages a few kilometers away needed UN assistance. Without water, the Gazans' most proud citrus has become a rare industry, and planting millennial olive trees has also been cut off by settlers.
Arab philosopher Ali Khalidi pointed out that today people’s first reactions to the blockade of Gaza are often high-tech isolation walls, as well as unmanned remote guns, remote TVs, infrared detectors, electronic fences, but in reality “the real blockade is not done through the walls of the entity.”
The cycle of “violence response to violence”
In 1970, in the third year of Israel’s full occupation of Gaza, Eid al-Sarraj completed his medical degree in Egypt and became a pediatrician at the Gaza Hospital. Israeli intelligence officials found Eid, who had just been at work, to provide him with information on Egyptian Arabic life dynamics. Eid refused.
Eyad sent a letter of protest to the Israeli government and parliament, condemning intelligence officials for turning hospitals into "spy recruitment sites." Doctors at Shifa Hospital went on strike. A few days later, Eyad was notified that he could go back to work. This was a minor incident in the "nonviolent resistance" of Gaza's new elite in the 1970s.
Michael Hudson, founder of the Washington Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, pointed out that, as in many colonies, the city’s resistance elite, after Israel’s occupation of Gaza, was mostly Western-educated teachers, engineers and doctors.
They act frequently: students teach strikes, lawyers resist military courts, elite groups and the West Bank collaborate to launch "disobedience movements", including refusing to pay taxes and resisting Israeli goods. They have the right to speak in the international community. Later Israeli negotiator Amos Giola recalled to China Newsweek that when the two sides negotiated on specific issues of the Gaza Strip implementation of the Oslo Agreement, "there was no need for Hebrew or Arabic, no need for translation, and a conversation entirely in English."
But on the other hand, there is a lack of links between the resistance elite and the underlying rebels driven by traditional factors such as religion, land. 80,000 civilians and 200,000 refugees are managed separately by the municipal government and the United Nations Near East Relief Project, and the strikes and resistance activities in the city center have never caused a reaction in the refugee camps. Refugees are regarded as borrowers and can only bear low-wage seasonal work in the fruit gardens and factories opened by Mayor Rashid Shaw. Other members of the City Council control the local banking and light industry outside the Israeli capital.
Middle photo: Palestinian fishermen unloading fish at the port in the Gaza Strip in September 2022
Next: Palestinian strawberry farmers in northern Gaza in December 2010
The bottom resisters are radicalized in poverty and despair. Guerrillas of all kinds hid in the center of towns, not only throwing grenades at Israeli military vehicles, but also attacking banks, post offices and markets that symbolize the ruling order. They mocked the local elite and the "unreliable international community" and accused Mayor Shawa of "the only thing he cares about is to ensure the export of his oranges".
In fact, with Israel’s blockade of land and water sources, the output of Shiva’s orange gardens declined. Occupants simultaneously stifled the business of the local elite while cutting off the link between them and the bottom. Yad el-Sarraj, who hoped to provide medical services to the people, was once expelled from the country by the Israeli government, and the union organization initiated by university students was dissolved by the Israeli military police. On the eve of the first Palestinian uprising in 1987, some union members held a final election at the Red Cross office. They were beaten by Israeli soldiers who had entered and then imprisoned.
Indiscriminate mass arrests allowed secular young intellectuals to adopt the radical concept of "jihad" in prison. They began to spread the myth of Lebanon militants: these Lebanon are said to have exhausted Israel's continued suicide car bomb attacks and withdrew its troops in 1985.
Confronted by radical rebels and occupiers, the local elite lost control of Gaza City. In 1982, when violent incidents began to occur frequently, the city of Shawa, senior city government officials, and city council members were expelled at the same time, and the Israeli army took over the city completely. Five years later, the first major uprising that changed the course of Middle East history broke out first in Gaza.
After the uprising, Eid began as an emergency doctor at the Shifa Hospital. After a broad dialogue with the insurgents, he made a sharp but pessimistic judgment: the people of Gaza had relentless perseverance, great courage, but “the consequences of violence were poisonous.” Boys who threw stones at tanks were regarded as “national heroes,” but could not cover up the psychological trauma and insecurity caused by violence. From a psychological perspective, Eid predicted that Israel’s repression and Gaza’s resistance would become even more cruel and ruthless.
A historical misunderstanding accelerated the tragedy: After the 1987 uprising, Israeli Foreign Minister Perez was deeply concerned about the future of Palestinian relations. He argued: Can Gaza be demilitarized, withdraw troops and Jewish settlements, and allow Palestinians to be autonomous? Perez's view was heavily attacked by the Israeli right wing. On the other hand, many Palestinians believe that violence can be exchanged for each other's concessions and peace.
In Gaza, radical groups began to be regarded as "real heroes." They are often religious extremists, and their supporters have begun attacking liquor stores, restaurants and movie theaters. These shops, which existed in Gaza City for a century, were suddenly regarded as "heretics." Since the 1990s, Hamas has become the most well-known radical armed group. In 2004, Hamas spiritual leader Yassin was assassinated by Israeli troops, and 200,000 people attended his funeral.
Former senior official of the Palestinian National Authority, Ezd Saig, recalled to China Newsweek that while the Middle East peace process failed, there were changes in the international landscape and factors that led the Israeli government to “turn to the right,” when the peace process was in trouble, the Palestinian leaders mistakenly allowed people to use violence in the Second Great Uprising in 2000, “thinking that this would turn the Israeli government around.”
20 years later, the cycle of "violent response to violence" continues to escalate, daring to publicly appeal to fewer and fewer well-known figures on both sides of the nonviolent party. In Gaza, Ayad adheres to the principle of nonviolence, being arrested and beaten by his fellow citizens. In prison, he hears interrogation among Palestinians, and the interrogation begins calmly, and gradually the voice of the interrogator turns into a scream. Suddenly, he starts in Hebrew!"
Ayad sees this as a vivid psychological example: a Palestinian who was once a victim in Israeli prisons, when he became an interrogator to interrogate his fellow citizens, subconsciously began to use the language of the Israeli officers interrogating him in the symbolic scene that best expressed his power. This shows that the "cycle of violence" has slowly been carved into everyone's heart.
In June 2007, Hamas disbanded Fatah forces, ousted its leaders and gained complete control of the Gaza Strip. In December 2013, Eyad died of leukemia at the age of 70. Less than half a year later, another large-scale conflict between the Israeli army and Hamas broke out in the Gaza Strip, killing about 1,500 civilians.
In September 2021, there was a severe shortage of drinking water in Gaza, with Palestinian children draining water from a public tap in a refugee camp.
“You can’t hear ‘despair’ from the people of Gaza.”
After a hundred years of war and blockade, what will the daily life of Gaza residents be like before October 7, 2023? The stories of the witnesses and a series of recollection articles published by the Palestinian Institute in Beirut can outline a general idea.
In the early morning, if you are awakened by the cry of sparrows outside the window, rather than by the sound of rockets or the phone call from the Israeli military, you will be happy. Instead of taking out emergency kits with clothes and credentials under their beds, people can sit at the dining table and have breakfast with family members who have survived previous conflicts.
In most households, there is usually no meat and milk on the table-they are strictly controlled imports. There may be hummus and you can drink orange or grape juice. People eat two meals a day, relying on coffee and tea until dinner, a habit formed after a long lockdown.
It has been a luxury to have breakfast at home. Israel destroyed more than 1,500 homes when it withdrew in 2005 and followed by large-scale military operations in 2008, 2012 and 2014. In 2008, less than a month of lead-melting operations led to the bombing of 6,000 houses. The UNHCR estimates that it would take 80 years to rebuild according to the building materials available to Gaza.
In 2005, Israel withdrew its troops from the Gaza Strip and withdrew its illegal settlements, and the blockade of Gaza entered the "third phase". Harvard researcher Sarah Roy calls this stage the final step in the process of "de-development": Gaza's economic and social foundation is close to "total destruction", and the rest is left to fend for itself.
In 2008, the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Washington: “Israeli officials have repeatedly confirmed to us that they intend to keep Gaza at risk of collapse.”
If they have excellent grades and wealthy families, Gaza students can take a 21-day complex college entrance examination, pass Arabic, English, culture, geography, history, mathematics and religion tests, and then pay about $1,000 in tuition fees to enter local universities. The literacy rate of Gazans is as high as 97%, and Hamas does not dare to close institutions of higher learning. The tradition here is "family comes first, education comes second, and nothing else is as important as these two."
However, academic qualifications and grades do not allow Gazans to find jobs. Gaza's poverty and unemployment rates exceed 60%. Light industry, which could have accommodated 40,000 jobs, has only 800 employees left after the occupation. The Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank pays salaries for 70,000 public officials in schools, hospitals and grassroots government. Due to tensions between the West Bank and Hamas, these urban elites have experienced two halving salary cuts in the past decade, and now "even the most decent occupations cannot support basic living."
The war since 2005 has destroyed tens of thousands of. Towers in downtown stores are limited to a few categories such as phone cards, cables, everyday tools, or to sell roasted meat. The larger business is almost gone: Few can cope with the Israeli government’s changing list of import and export licenses. Some agricultural products meet requirements, but can’t withstand months of approval processes and expensive shipping costs.
In order to survive, there are thousands of short-distance commercial tunnels that are less than one kilometer long from Rafah in southern Gaza to Egypt, supporting the basic needs of daily life. Common transportation commodities include agricultural seeds, pesticides, hoes and other farm tools that are prohibited from being imported by Israel. During festivals, there will be fresh beef, mutton and toys. At one point, tunnel workers were the highest-paid group in Gaza: they worked 12-hour shifts and earned $75 a day. However, with the "involution", the tunnel construction industry is crowded with cheap child labor, and the data of deaths due to collapse accidents is unknown. After October 2023, Israel declared that these tunnels were "Hamas fortifications."
Fishing is a historic industry in the coastal city of Gaza, which, thanks to the ocean’s gifts, has failed to collapse as thoroughly as the third phase of agriculture and light industry” before Gaza had tens of thousands of fishermen, with more than two thousand left by 2023.
However, in 2006 and 2009, the Israeli Navy twice updated the sea-out restrictions for Gaza residents, reducing them from 20 nautical miles to 3 nautical miles. This meant that the sardines and goldfish grown areas with slightly higher prices could not be reached, with 95% of fishermen earning less than $5 a day. In 2019, the Israeli Navy fired 347 times at fishermen near 3 nautical miles, basically attacking them every day.
More than 1,500 people are diagnosed with cancer here every year, but chemotherapy drugs and radiation equipment have been banned from entering Gaza, and 80% of common anti-cancer drugs are lacking. In order to survive, you have to go to Jerusalem for treatment. Expensive medical and living expenses are second, which first requires approval from the Gaza Strip health department and then materials are submitted to the Israeli security department. Less than half of each round of applications are approved, but most people can’t survive that moment.
Beyond work and illness, the third challenge faced by Gazaans is dealing with their relationship with Hamas.Hamas claimed to have won the 2006 elections and was therefore a “legitimate government”.The Israeli government identified with Hamas’s statement that most Gazaans “choose Hamas and choose punishment.”
Witnesses know the truth about Hamas 'seizure of power. "I remember Hamas killing people on the streets and throwing people down buildings," said Gilao, a former general counsel for the Israeli force in Gaza."It was a brutal struggle." Brian Barber is the only scholar to conduct a large-scale population survey in Gaza. He said the vast majority of Gazans "have no choice."
"In fact, considering that no 'election' has been held in the Gaza Strip since 2006, the majority of Gaza civilians killed since October 2023 have never had a chance to vote for anyone." said Mouin Rabbani, a senior researcher at the Palestine Institute in Beirut.
Specific contact with Hamas members is like "opening a blind box." Barber had the dangerous experience of almost being beaten, and he also met high-level Hamas officials who ostensibly respected him. Jennifer Loewenstein, a Middle East scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, first encounters rude Hamas officials. The next day, another official handed her tea and chocolate and said with a smile, "You don't have to wear a headscarf".
But the reality is that wearing a headscarf in public has become the choice of the vast majority of Gaza women, although most of them refuse to wear it at home. Hamas prohibits men and women from sitting together at concerts and does not allow "new music" such as rap to be performed in public. Hamas officials in some areas have banned residents from going to Internet cafes and watching Hollywood movies. In other areas, the power of grassroots governance is transferred to local elites such as scholars and teachers, who do not control how people entertain.
Compared to life and death, daily difficulties appear to be “substantial”. A major feature of the third phase of power shortages in Gaza is the Israeli government’s further cuts in electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza. The Israeli Supreme Court approved the cuts and ruled that people in Gaza do not need electricity every day to live.
Gazans did survive. When there is only 4 hours, 3 hours or even less of electricity a day, the noise of generators rings across the city, and fuel smuggled from the tunnel turns into black smoke and hangs over the city. Long wires are strung out in potholed streets and alleys for neighbors to share them. Engineers at the university have independently developed solar power kits that are enough to power a home in the summer. The only problem is that the production materials need to be smuggled, and most people cannot afford the high expenses.
Another change in the "third stage" is that there are fewer and fewer foreigners. For foreign journalists and scholars, arriving in Gaza meant hours of humiliation at Ben Gurion Airport, including individual strip checks and questioning by security officials. If they are lucky enough to pass the first level, they will wait in the dust outside the Erez checkpoint, which may be quick, or it may be half a day, a day or a refusal. The only simple link is documentation: a powerful intermediary can obtain both IDF and Hamas passes. "I don't know how they do it, but they do it every time." Barber said.
Now, this difficult arrival is also becoming unfeasible. No international journalist has been given permission to enter the Gaza Strip since October 2023.
Academics who frequent Gaza do not consider leisure life in Gaza to be dull. Privately, Gaza residents avoid Hamas members and secretly drink alcohol. People love to party and often go to the beach and cafes. Hamas failed to ban street culture, and some shop signs were completed by graffiti artists.
The most well-known creation by local artists is the "Gaza Metro". They erected the "M"(Metro) platform sign around Gaza City, symbolizing the extended tunnel network. The problem for the artists is that the Israeli military may identify these signs as military installations and attack them.
The youth’s hobby is to run and surf, which brings “a sense of freedom to cross the barriers of isolation”. But they can’t run too far: tens of thousands of bombs left of war have not yet been demolished. Surfers can see the Israeli patrol boats on the edge of 3 nautical miles at any time, as well as Israeli drones roaming on the beach. In 2006, Israeli patrol boats shot holidayers on the beach, killing eight civilians. In 2014, nine young people watching the World Cup at a beach café, and four children playing on the beach, died in the gunfire of the Israeli Navy. The Israeli government acknowledged some of these actions as “tragic mistakes.”
"Gazans have a hard life, but they don't give up," Barber said. "You can't hear'despair 'from a Gazan population. They are always ideal until they are killed."