News stories by Eva Bartlett, page 3

Yousef walks barefoot into a children's room with four beds and points to a snoopy-blanketed bed by the window. 'That's where I sleep,' he says. A red remote-controlled toy racecar sits atop a new mini-laptop. The closet is full of clothes, a pot of soup simmering on the gas range in the spacious kitchen, and the wooden dining table is piled with seasonal fruit.

'Taking our water is not like taking a toy. Water is life, they cannot play with our lives like this,' says Maher Najjar, deputy general director of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU) of the recent Israeli threat to cut electricity, water and infrastructure services to the occupied Gaza Strip.

It's a sunny Gaza morning and although a work day, the beach along Sheik Rajleen has enough people on it to keep Gaza's small number of lifeguards busy and alert. From a simple, raised wooden hut, a team of three monitor the sea, periodically calling out to swimmers below to move to calmer waters.

It's a weekday morning, the beach is yet to fill with crowds seeking a break from the heat, but already the odd-jobbers are at work selling toys, clothes and food along the coast.

On any given evening, Gaza's small downtown pedestrian area, the Jundi, is crowded with adults and children. Many are fleeing the heat of their homes during the regular power cuts. The majority are there for want of something to do, even if that means merely sitting on the park's simple concrete benches to talk and sip tea.

'My father was a boat-builder and I learned from him, worked on boats all my life. Now there's no work at all.' Abu Fayez Bakr, 64, is one of two boat-builders in the Gaza Strip, the last of a dying trade, despite Palestinians' penchant for the sea and its bounty.

'We could enter the Guinness book of records for the longest running weekly sit- ins in the world,' Nasser Farrah, from the Palestinian Prisoners' Association, jokes dryly. Since 1995, Palestinian women from Beit Hanoun to Rafah have met every Monday outside the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Gaza City, holding photos and posters of their imprisoned loved ones, calling on the ICRC to ensure the human rights of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel's 24 prisons and detention centres.

'When I came back to Gaza in 2006, before the siege started, people came to me for acupuncture,' says Dr. Hisham Mwtoweh, a medical doctor and acupuncture practitioner trained in China and Korea.

Waddah Bsaiso is ready to export, if the Israeli-imposed siege would allow him. He has the experience, the contacts, and the products, but is prevented by Israel's strict ban on virtually all Gazan exports, save a token amount of flowers periodically allowed out of the Strip.

It is another sweltering morning in Gaza. Despite the heat, a tenacious group of women, men and children gathers near the bombed Agricultural College in Beit Hanoun for the weekly march to the 'buffer zone', the 300 metres flanking the Gaza-Israel Green Line border which Israeli authorities have declared off-limits to Palestinians.