press hasn’t arrived on the scene yet. With my short hair and white fake-fur coat, I feel utterly conspicuous. As we attempt to wade across the street – which right now feels like trying to part the sea – one man in all these thousands suddenly stands still, points straight at me and roars something at the top of his lungs. The crowd surrounding him all appear to turn their eyes on me at once and then erupt into guffaws of laughter that bounce across the street towards us.
What the …?
Like a confused child to a parent, I turn to Tariq for an answer – but he’s laughing so much that he is almost bent over double.
When he straightens up, he says, wiping his streaming eyes, ‘That man over there, he shouted: “Look! Even the foreigners are escaping from Gaza!”’
I start laughing too. Tonight I’m a jailbreaker!
Eventually we find a minibus we can squeeze into and start the tortuous crawl south out of Rafah towards al-Arish. Our elation saps as we stare at the crowds and vehicles bottle-necked at the town entrance. My head is throbbing and my lungs sting from diesel fumes leaching out of hundreds of vehicles going nowhere.
Tariq slumps in his seat, which is too small for his big, square body.
‘I’m glad we are here, to see this – but it’s crazy. You know, we Palestinians used to dream of real freedom, our own independent state. And look at us now – blowing up our border to escape for a few days shopping. Pathetic.’
He pushes drooping hair out of his eyes. Tariq came back to Gaza just seven months ago. He was studying at university in the US, and returned here the week before Hamas took over the Strip. He cracks jokes about his own terrible timing. His father is Gazan, his mother comes from the Balkans. I met her once and she told me in her still-strong Slavic accent that she could live with war; people from the Balkans and Gaza, they know how to live with war. It was the imprisonment that was slowly killing everyone, she said; this siege is like sentencing people to a long, slow death.
Tariq has told me that on his way to work, he sometimes has the overwhelming urge to keep driving his car until he reaches the border fence, then crash straight through it and just go out in flames. He lights a cigarette and offers me one, and we smoke because there is nothing else to do. I’ve been too caught up in the thrill of this night for any kind of reflection, but for all its audacity there is something pathetic about this crush; it’s like a mass breakout of prisoners or refugees with nowhere to flee to because nobody wants them. Many are already on their way back inside. Tariq asks a man squashed beside us in the bus why
he
crossed the border this evening.
‘To breathe some fresh air outside our
sijin
,’ he says.
He’s a Hamas policeman. His friend, sitting beside him, is a policeman too – but a Fatah supporter, so he is out of work. 19 The two of them say they are best friends and have just come along for the ride. They’re going to al-Arish too, then back to Gaza before dawn, because the Hamas guy has to be at work in the morning. Come to think of it, so do I.
The minibus barely moves and eventually the four of us desert it. We start walking out of town and eventually find a Bedouin man with bad breath and a bashed Mercedes-Benz who agrees to take us to al-Arish for a price. Everything has its price.
Al-Arish is a small Mediterranean seaside resort 28 miles south of the Gaza border, on the road towards Cairo – but we all know that checkpoints have been erected just outside al-Arish, to make sure Gazans don’t stray beyond the town. The Egyptian authorities don’t have the resources to rebuild the wall for at least the next few days, but offering sanctuary to Gazans would jeopardise Egypt’s brittle rapprochement with Israel – and the authorities there fear Hamas’s relationship with the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement.
As he tears along rough roads with no headlights on, the
What the …?
Like a confused child to a parent, I turn to Tariq for an answer – but he’s laughing so much that he is almost bent over double.
When he straightens up, he says, wiping his streaming eyes, ‘That man over there, he shouted: “Look! Even the foreigners are escaping from Gaza!”’
I start laughing too. Tonight I’m a jailbreaker!
Eventually we find a minibus we can squeeze into and start the tortuous crawl south out of Rafah towards al-Arish. Our elation saps as we stare at the crowds and vehicles bottle-necked at the town entrance. My head is throbbing and my lungs sting from diesel fumes leaching out of hundreds of vehicles going nowhere.
Tariq slumps in his seat, which is too small for his big, square body.
‘I’m glad we are here, to see this – but it’s crazy. You know, we Palestinians used to dream of real freedom, our own independent state. And look at us now – blowing up our border to escape for a few days shopping. Pathetic.’
He pushes drooping hair out of his eyes. Tariq came back to Gaza just seven months ago. He was studying at university in the US, and returned here the week before Hamas took over the Strip. He cracks jokes about his own terrible timing. His father is Gazan, his mother comes from the Balkans. I met her once and she told me in her still-strong Slavic accent that she could live with war; people from the Balkans and Gaza, they know how to live with war. It was the imprisonment that was slowly killing everyone, she said; this siege is like sentencing people to a long, slow death.
Tariq has told me that on his way to work, he sometimes has the overwhelming urge to keep driving his car until he reaches the border fence, then crash straight through it and just go out in flames. He lights a cigarette and offers me one, and we smoke because there is nothing else to do. I’ve been too caught up in the thrill of this night for any kind of reflection, but for all its audacity there is something pathetic about this crush; it’s like a mass breakout of prisoners or refugees with nowhere to flee to because nobody wants them. Many are already on their way back inside. Tariq asks a man squashed beside us in the bus why
he
crossed the border this evening.
‘To breathe some fresh air outside our
sijin
,’ he says.
He’s a Hamas policeman. His friend, sitting beside him, is a policeman too – but a Fatah supporter, so he is out of work. 19 The two of them say they are best friends and have just come along for the ride. They’re going to al-Arish too, then back to Gaza before dawn, because the Hamas guy has to be at work in the morning. Come to think of it, so do I.
The minibus barely moves and eventually the four of us desert it. We start walking out of town and eventually find a Bedouin man with bad breath and a bashed Mercedes-Benz who agrees to take us to al-Arish for a price. Everything has its price.
Al-Arish is a small Mediterranean seaside resort 28 miles south of the Gaza border, on the road towards Cairo – but we all know that checkpoints have been erected just outside al-Arish, to make sure Gazans don’t stray beyond the town. The Egyptian authorities don’t have the resources to rebuild the wall for at least the next few days, but offering sanctuary to Gazans would jeopardise Egypt’s brittle rapprochement with Israel – and the authorities there fear Hamas’s relationship with the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement.
As he tears along rough roads with no headlights on, the
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