"It's one thing to see a disaster zone on television or read about it in the papers. But no matter how good the journalism or the footage, you never really get the full picture until you've been there.
And that's how it was with Gaza; nothing really can prepare you for the devastation.
It didn't help that I'd only arrived in Israel two days before as the ABC's new Middle East correspondent. I'd never even been to the Middle East before.
Yet here I was on my second day jet lagged, culture shocked, confused, heading to Gaza for my first assignment. And what I saw wasn't at all what I expected.
I think I'd naively believed that life inside Gaza, before the bombs at least, wasn't so different from life outside - in terms of the people, the buildings, the quality of life.
But going through the Erez border crossing from Israel to Gaza I might have been going to another planet.
On the outside Israel is largely a first world, affluent and of course Jewish nation, with first class roads and a mostly functioning society. Just a few metres away over the fence it's a land of despair and destruction.
In the north of Gaza especially, building after building is a mess of concrete rubble, since the Israelis bombed this Palestinian territory in January.
Hundreds and hundreds of houses, apartment blocks, schools, offices, even the prison lie in ruins. Twisted layers of jagged concrete dot the landscape for miles. Refugee camps with rows of identical tents are now home for many families."
So begins a report by Anne Barker on ABC Radio National's program Correspondent's Report. It clearly was an eye-opener for the new correspondent to the Middle East - as the remainder of her report, here, clearly demonstrates.
That Gaza is still under siege and going nowhere is clearly shown in just one reports of many available.
IPS reports:
"Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of aid intended for the Gaza Strip is piling up in cities across Egypt's North Sinai region, despite recent calls from the United Nations to ease aid flow restrictions to the embattled territory in the wake of Operation Cast Lead.
Food, medicine, blankets, infant food and other supplies for Gaza's 1.5 million people, coming from governments and non-governmental agencies around the world, are being stored in warehouses, parking lots, stadiums and on airport runways across Egypt's North Sinai governorate.
Egypt shares a 14-kilometre border with Gaza that has been closed more or less permanently since the Islamist movement Hamas took control of the territory in June 2007.
Flour, pasta, sugar, coffee, chocolate, tomato sauce, lentils, date bars, juice, chickpeas, blankets, hospital beds, catheter tubes and other humanitarian- based items are all sitting in at least eight storage points in and around Al- Arish, a city in North Sinai approximately 50 kilometres from Gaza's border.
Three months after the end of the war, much of the aid has either rotted or been irreparably damaged as a result of both rain and sunshine, and Egypt's refusal to open the Rafah crossing."
Lastly, this report in The Washington Times "When Israel expelled Palestinians" by Randall Kuhn, an assistant professor and Director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies, puts the issue of the Palestinians into context. He has just returned from visiting Israel and the West Bank.
And that's how it was with Gaza; nothing really can prepare you for the devastation.
It didn't help that I'd only arrived in Israel two days before as the ABC's new Middle East correspondent. I'd never even been to the Middle East before.
Yet here I was on my second day jet lagged, culture shocked, confused, heading to Gaza for my first assignment. And what I saw wasn't at all what I expected.
I think I'd naively believed that life inside Gaza, before the bombs at least, wasn't so different from life outside - in terms of the people, the buildings, the quality of life.
But going through the Erez border crossing from Israel to Gaza I might have been going to another planet.
On the outside Israel is largely a first world, affluent and of course Jewish nation, with first class roads and a mostly functioning society. Just a few metres away over the fence it's a land of despair and destruction.
In the north of Gaza especially, building after building is a mess of concrete rubble, since the Israelis bombed this Palestinian territory in January.
Hundreds and hundreds of houses, apartment blocks, schools, offices, even the prison lie in ruins. Twisted layers of jagged concrete dot the landscape for miles. Refugee camps with rows of identical tents are now home for many families."
So begins a report by Anne Barker on ABC Radio National's program Correspondent's Report. It clearly was an eye-opener for the new correspondent to the Middle East - as the remainder of her report, here, clearly demonstrates.
That Gaza is still under siege and going nowhere is clearly shown in just one reports of many available.
IPS reports:
"Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of aid intended for the Gaza Strip is piling up in cities across Egypt's North Sinai region, despite recent calls from the United Nations to ease aid flow restrictions to the embattled territory in the wake of Operation Cast Lead.
Food, medicine, blankets, infant food and other supplies for Gaza's 1.5 million people, coming from governments and non-governmental agencies around the world, are being stored in warehouses, parking lots, stadiums and on airport runways across Egypt's North Sinai governorate.
Egypt shares a 14-kilometre border with Gaza that has been closed more or less permanently since the Islamist movement Hamas took control of the territory in June 2007.
Flour, pasta, sugar, coffee, chocolate, tomato sauce, lentils, date bars, juice, chickpeas, blankets, hospital beds, catheter tubes and other humanitarian- based items are all sitting in at least eight storage points in and around Al- Arish, a city in North Sinai approximately 50 kilometres from Gaza's border.
Three months after the end of the war, much of the aid has either rotted or been irreparably damaged as a result of both rain and sunshine, and Egypt's refusal to open the Rafah crossing."
Lastly, this report in The Washington Times "When Israel expelled Palestinians" by Randall Kuhn, an assistant professor and Director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies, puts the issue of the Palestinians into context. He has just returned from visiting Israel and the West Bank.
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