CNN Opinion: Our mask-wearing road trip across a battered America

By Sandy Tolan for CNN.

(CNN) In January, as Covid cases spiked in California, refrigerated morgue trucks rolled into Los Angeles, ICUs overflowed, oxygen supplies depleted and full ambulances waited in lines for hours, my wife, Andrea, and I faced a dilemma. The two of us had spent Christmas in Tucson, and planned to drive home to Los Angeles, but our 11-year-old son was in Florida with his biological dad. Andrea had a plane ticket to bring Wyatt back. But flying, especially out of Los Angeles International Airport, seemed too risky. Better to stay at super-clean Airbnbs, order contactless food, and drive across the country to Miami.

And so on January 18 we embarked on the strangest of American road trips, crossing eight states and back, 6,000 miles in 18 days: a surreal and spectacular journey, sure to reveal truths about our battered nation, our resilient people, and ourselves.

Click here to read the full piece.

The Atlantic: What Hank Aaron Told Me

When I spoke with my boyhood hero 25 years after his famous home run, I learned why he’d kept going through the death threats and the hate.

By Sandy Tolan for The Atlantic

One morning in Milwaukee in 1972, I read in the sports pages that my hero, Henry Aaron, was getting hate mail and death threats simply for following his dream. Hank, the superstar outfielder for the Atlanta Braves, was approaching what was then considered the greatest record in sports: the career home-run record of 714, held by the legendary Babe Ruth. During his chase of the Babe, Hank received 929,000 letters—at an ounce a piece, 29 tons of mail. Some of it cheered Hank on, but much of it was filled with racist hate and violent threats.

One of the letters was from me. Hank’s Milwaukee Braves had abandoned us for Atlanta six years earlier. But I’d stayed a fan, managing to tune into Braves’ games through the static on WSM, the Nashville station of the Grand Ole Opry. “Don’t listen to those racists,” I urged Hank. “We’re rooting for you up here in Milwaukee.”

Click here to read the full piece.

"The Lemon Tree" (Young Readers' Edition) Featured on Kirkus Best Books of 2020 List

The Young Readers’ Edition of “The Lemon Tree” was featured on The Kirkus Best Books of 2020 list.

Find it on the Best of Middle-Grade Fiction list here.

Read the Kirkus review of “The Lemon Tree’” (Young Readers’ Edition) here.

"The Lemon Tree" (Young Readers' Edition) out now

The Young Readers’ Edition of my book, “The Lemon Tree: A Arab, A Jew and the Heart of the Middle East,” is out now.

In 1967, a twenty-five-year-old refugee named Bashir Khairi traveled from the Palestinian hill town of Ramallah to Ramla, Israel, with a goal: to see the beloved stone house with the lemon tree in its backyard that he and his family had been forced to leave nineteen years earlier. When he arrived, he was greeted by one of its new residents: Dalia Eshkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student whose family had fled Europe following the Holocaust. She had lived in that house since she was eleven months old.

On the stoop of this shared house, Dalia and Bashir began a surprising friendship, forged in the aftermath of war and later tested as political tensions ran high and Israelis and Palestinians each asserted their own right to live on this land. Adapted from the award-winning adult book and based on Sandy Tolan's extensive research and reporting, “The Lemon Tree” is a deeply personal story of two people seeking hope, transformation, and home.

Click here to purchase and learn more.

The Guardian: Wisconsin decided to allow people to vote this week. People will die as a result

By Sandy Tolan for The Guardian

The Wisconsin I grew up in was mostly a pleasant, comforting place – a Great Lakes state filled with gently sloping parks, dairy farms dotted with Holstein cows, ethnic festivals at the beachfront, and families who lived in brick houses for a long time. Despite sharp racial disparities and income inequality, Wisconsin earned its reputation as a purple state with mostly civil, moderate politics marked by midwestern humility and decency.

OK, so that bucolic vision vanished a while ago. I haven’t lived in Wisconsin for years. But on Tuesday the last faded shade of purple was washed away entirely when the divisions turned downright murderous. After a drawn-out battle between a Democratic governor and Republican legislature, the conservative Wisconsin supreme court issued a last-minute order telling confused election officials to proceed with the state’s primary election – despite a pandemic.

With coronavirus numbers in Wisconsin up sharply in recent days, the court’s decision risks sending countless (Democratic) voters to early and painful deaths. In contrast to the 15 states which have postponed primary elections, Wisconsin alone will send voters to the polls in April.

Click here to read the full article.

Los Angeles Times: A battle for the heavens on Mauna Kea

by Sandy Tolan for Los Angeles Times

Demonstrators opposed to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea block access road. [Bruce Asato / Honolulu Star-Advertiser ]

For astronomers, the clear, dry air of Mauna Kea, the tallest peak in Hawaii, provides the best place in the Northern Hemisphere, and perhaps on Earth, for observing the heavens. It is here, at nearly 14,000 feet, that a consortium led by Caltech and the University of California want to place a massive telescope, 18 stories tall, that would serve as a celestial time machine.

The Thirty Meter Telescope, as it is known, would give astronomers the ability to “peer through space-time to the beginning of the universe 13 billion years ago, all the way back to nearly the hot big bang,” according to UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist and Thirty Meter Telescope board member Michael Bolte.

Native Hawaiians agree that Mauna Kea connects humanity to the universe — as an umbilical cord between Earth and space. The peak at Mauna Kea is the “highest point where land touches the sky — where the two deities, Sky Father and Earth Mother, meet,” said Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, 68, a retired cultural studies professor and elder in the fight against the telescope. To Native Hawaiians, putting a giant telescope on their sacred mountain is a desecration.

Click here to read the full article.

Truthdig: Censoring This Documentary Only Plays Into AIPAC's Hands

A scene still from "1948: Creation and Catastrophe" via Truthdig

by Sandy Tolan for Truthdig

On Wednesday, in keeping with its image as a progressive leader in social policy, the City of West Hollywood, Calif., was scheduled to host a film screening and panel discussion on the painful birth of Israel and the Palestinian refugee crisis. Instead, the city is playing censor, “postponing” the event until further notice.

The screening of the new documentary, “1948: Creation and Catastrophe,” and panel, which I was invited to join, are part of West Hollywood’s Human Rights Speaker Series, co-sponsored by PBS SoCal. But after spurious allegations of anti-Semitism by local rabbi Denise Eger, the city pulled the plug. City Council member Lindsey Horvath said she didn’t want West Hollywood to become a “refuge for hate.”

The real issue here, as it is increasingly in public forums and media across America, is who gets to tell the story.

Click here to read the full article.

WEHOville: West Hollywood and the New Thought Police

Photo via WeHoVille

Tonight, Wednesday, December 12, in keeping with its image as a progressive leader in social policy, the City of West Hollywood was to have hosted a film screening and panel discussion on the painful birth of Israel and the Palestinian refugee crisis. Instead, the city is playing censor, “postponing” the event until further notice. 

The screening and panel, which I was invited to join, was part of West Hollywood’s Human Rights Speaker Series and co-sponsored by PBS SoCal. It was to feature the new documentary, “1948: Creation and Catastrophe.” But after spurious allegations of anti-Semitism by a local rabbi, the city pulled the plug. City Councilmember Lindsey Horvath said she didn’t want West Hollywood to become a “refuge for hate.”

But the real issue here, as it is increasingly in public forums and the media across America, is who gets to tell the story. 

Click here to read the full article.

Foreign Policy: Israel's About-Face on Gaza

A Palestinian girl fills up a bottle with water from a cistern in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct. 24. Photo by Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images (via Foreign Policy)

Netanyahu may be changing his mind about war. If he does, it will be thanks to an environmental and health disaster that threatens to cross the border.

by Sandy Tolan for Foreign Policy

Last week’s cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, following an Israeli military incursion and retaliatory rocket fire from Gaza, may reflect an increasing awareness within Israel that war is not in the country’s self-interest. At the heart of the matter is Gaza’s mounting humanitarian disaster, which threatens to spill over the border.

For months, the United Nations and other humanitarian groups have warned that Gaza—with its overlapping problems of poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, contaminated water, and disease—will be “unlivable” by 2020. The U.N., the World Bank, Save the Children, and other groups even cautioned that continued Israeli bombing and economic blockade could bring Gaza to a state of collapse, from which Israel would not be immune.

Such warnings are nothing new. The difference now is that people at the center of power in Israel appear to be listening.

Click here to read the full article.

Tolan on Gaza for BBC World News - Newsday

The BBC World Series program, Newsday, did an interview with Sandy about his latest findings on the water crisis in Gaza. Click here to listen to the segment (at 45:48).

Al Jazeera English: How can Gaza's contaminated water catastrophe be solved?

Barely three percent of Gaza's drinking water wells is fit for human consumption, and the crisis is claiming lives.

by Sandy Tolan for Al Jazeera English (Part Two of a Two-Part Series)

Gaza - When it comes to survival in Gaza, safe, clean drinking water is not at the top of Mousa Hillah's list of priorities. 

Mousa Hilleh, 48, rebuilt his home after the 2014 Gaza war and says not having access to clean water is a major concern [Abdel Kareem Hana/Al Jazeera]

Since the 2014 war, Hillah, known to neighbours and family as Abu Ali, has had far bigger worries, which are etched deeply into the exhausted face of the 48-year-old grandfather.

Dodging shell fire from Israeli tanks, he fled with his family from the destruction of his Shuja'iyya neighbourhood, flattened by Israel in an attack so devastating - 7,000 shells in barely an hour - that it astonished even US military officials. ("Holy bejeezus!" one retired general exclaimed.)

The family took refuge for months in an in-law's house near the sea, along with 50 other people. When they returned, Abu Ali found his home - the one he had built after 30 years of working construction in Israel - utterly destroyed.

Brick by board, he rebuilt it, adorning his front entrance, in a dose of biting irony, with repurposed tank shells.

Click here to read the full story.

Al Jazeera English: Gaza's drinking water spurs blue baby syndrome, serious illnesses

Contaminated and scarce water owing to Israel's brutal siege and bombing of infrastructure leads to death and disease.

by Sandy Tolan for Al Jazeera English (Part One of a Two-Part Series)

Gaza - The unshaven doctor with circles under his eyes enters the children's ward at Al Nassar hospital in Gaza City. It's a Thursday evening, almost the weekend. The ward is bleak and eerily quiet, but for the occasional wail of an infant.

At each cubicle, sectioned off by curtains, it's a similar image: A baby lies alone in a bed, hooked up to tubes, wires and a generator; a mother sits in silent witness at the bedside.

A Palestinian woman bathes her son with water from a tank filled by a charity inside their dwelling in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip July 3, 2017 [Mohammed Salem/Reuters via Al Jazeera English]

Dr Mohamad Abu Samia, the hospital's director of paediatric medicine, exchanges a few quiet words with one mother, then gently lifts the infant's gown, revealing a scar from heart surgery nearly half the length of her body.

At the next cubicle, he attends to a child suffering from severe malnutrition. She lies still, her tiny body connected to a respirator. Because electricity runs only four hours a day in Gaza, the baby must stay here, where generators keep her alive.

Click here to read the full story.

Tolan on the Gaza Water Crisis on PRI's "Living On Earth"

In the Mideast’s hotly contested Gaza Strip, where three out of four people are refugees, access to electricity and clean water is severely limited. The unsafe drinking water has led to a worsening health crisis for Gaza’s children, who suffer from diarrhea, kidney disease, stunted growth and impaired IQ. The problems include the lack of electricity to run Gaza’s sewage treatment plant, and the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Sandy Tolan reports from the Gaza Strip. Click below to listen to the full story or click here for the full show transcript.

Mohammad Nimnim wheels water jugs, to fill at the mosque at Beach refugee camp. (Photo: Abdel Kareem Hanna via PRI/Living On Earth)

The Daily Beast: Gaza’s Dying of Thirst, and Its Water Crisis Will Become a Threat to Israel

SAID KHATIB/AFP/Getty (via Daily Beast)

With Gaza’s water system on the verge of “collapse” a humanitarian catastrophe looms, including potential epidemics. The consequences will reach far beyond Gaza’s borders.

by Sandy Tolan for The Daily Beast

GAZA – Mohammed Nimnim carries the water for his family. On a scorching late morning last summer, the 15-year-old pushed an old wheelchair piled high with empty plastic jugs through Gaza’s Shati (Beach) refugee camp. He rattled past modest groceries, makeshift tire shops, and graffiti praising Gaza’s martyrs, down broken concrete lanes, and toward the local mosque, where sputtering taps provide the family’s only source of drinking water.  

No luck. Although it was 94 degrees and oppressively humid, the taps at the mosque were shut off. Mohammed turned around, empty-handed. He walked back under a pounding sun through the Beach Camp, a place whose very name taunts its residents. Barely 100 meters from the Mediterranean, the 87,000 refugees squeezed onto half a square kilometer here face a growing crisis of scarce and contaminated water.  

Mohammed’s mom, Abeer Nimnim, paused to greet us as her son returned with the empty jugs. “May God give you health!” she exclaimed to her visitors. Then she got to the point: “It’s hot and suffocating!”

Four generations of Nimnims, 19 people in all, crowd into three small rooms off a narrow Beach Camp alley. Next to Abeer sits her mother-in-law, Fatemah, 73, who was five when her family was driven from the Palestinian village of Hamama, depopulated during the creation of Israel in 1948. They fled to Gaza, where today three-fourths of the nearly two million Gazans are refugees and their descendants. The family sits on thin cushions on the floor of the airless front room. Because Gaza gets only four to five hours a day of electricity, there’s no fan, not to mention hardly any room to move around. “There isn’t enough space to sleep,” says Abeer. “There’s no space at all, can you see that?”

“And water? Forget about it,” said Abeer’s husband, Atef. “There isn’t any.” In fact, water occasionally runs through the tap, but it’s so salty, no one in Gaza will drink it. “Life is very difficult, you cannot imagine,” Atef laments. “No offense, but dogs live better than me.”

Click here to read the full story.

Ramzi's dream: Beethoven's Ninth in Jerusalem

For the last decade the Palestinian musician Ramzi Aburedwan dreamed of bringing 200 musicians and singers to Jerusalem for a triumphant performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It was an improbable dream for any single musician, even moreso for this 39-year-old violist who, like most Palestinians, is routinely denied entry to Jerusalem to pray, to visit family, or to play concerts in the Holy City as founder of the respected music school, Al Kamandjati (The Violinist).

But what seemed like a crazy dream to others, Ramzi always saw as a strategic challenge requiring careful planning. So it was for the child of the First Intifada, who at age eight, from the refugee camp of Al Amari near Ramallah, hurled stones at Israeli soldiers, to expel them from occupied Palestine. Ten years later, after an older friend introduced him to music, Ramzi began to dream of founding a music school to, literally and metaphorically, protect Palestinian children from those soldiers. Which Ramzi did, against the odds, in the middle of the Second Intifada in 2005. 

And so putting on Beethoven's Ninth in Jerusalem, when Israel wouldn't even grant him and other Palestinians a permit? When it would require some 150 musicians and singers from Europe and North America to travel to the Holy Land, and risk being turned away at the airport by Israeli authorities, as some musicians were? Or, for Palestinians, to risk prison by sneaking into Jerusalem disguised as tourists or hidden under blankets, just to play Beethoven? To Ramzi, all this was just another challenge.

And so, sopranos and baritones, violinists and cellists, woodwinds and tenors and timpanists and horn players all converged in the stunning chapel at the Augusta Victoria Hospital, just outside the walls of the Old City. They came from France and Germany, the U.K., Switzerland, Norway and Slovenia, Japan, Holland, America and #Palestine. And they played Beethoven's Ninth, and they sang the message of universal brotherhood imbedded in the Ode to Joy, in what surely was one of the most triumphant and emotional performances in the history of this magnificent symphony.

Click here to watch the video. 

Dispatches from Gaza: Aug 2 (A Wave of Sadness)

The indelible images of suffering and stories of loss are everywhere in #Gaza. The family of 19 in three small rooms whose only drinking water comes from plastic jugs filled at the mosque. The woman who lost 38 members of her family during Israeli strikes in 2014. The man who lived with 49 others in a relative's house after his neighborhood of Shujaiya was flattened. But there is something else that abides in the day-to-day life in Gaza that for me resonates just as deeply: a kind of stubborn resilience in the face of catastrophe.

The other night I was walking along a spit of sand and rock that forms part of the Gaza harbor with Raed, my colleague and translator. The place was rippling with everyday life: fishermen pulling up their nets, laughing and giving each other grief; kids posing for selfies; families gathered under beach umbrellas at small plastic tables, sharing a modest picnic.

A young couple with their three kids invited us to join them. The children nibbled from bags of chips, eyeing me shyly. Rana Dilly poured mango soda into small plastic cups while her husband, Ahmad, pushed an unopened package of chocolate wafers toward me. I politely declined, which of course was a mistake. He laughed and pushed the package closer, telling me, "You are with Palestinians!" In other words, your resistance to our hospitality is futile!

Ahmad told me that despite the hardships and frequent dangers, he tries to come to this little finger of land nearly every day, just to clear his head and have some kind of normal feeling. He brings the family once or twice a week. “I want to share life,” he told me. “To share some things with my family and my kids. To show them something is possible.”

His sentiments reminded me of a time, 25 years ago, when I was in Sarajevo during the Balkan wars. My BBC colleague and I were walking briskly through an area potentially vulnerable to sniper fire, when we heard a large scraping sound approaching us from behind. We turned to see a half dozen girls on roller skates, laughing and screaming. We asked them to talk to us; to explain what in the world they were doing there. It was spring, they explained. They had been cooped up inside all winter as Serbian shells rained down on the town. Families had picked the hills clean, burning every scrap of firewood to stay warm; eventually they turned their furniture into kindling, and finally turned to the books. (The choice of which book to burn and which to save was often excruciating. Local black humor of the day: Would you like to come over for coffee on Shakespeare or tea on Byron?) The girls told us, somewhat ferociously: "If they shoot us, they shoot us. We have to go out and play!" Just then we could hear distant gunfire, and the girls laughed, screamed, and skated away.

Now, at the Gaza harbor, an explosion echoes from across the water. Raed and the young parents exchange looks. A pause; then Raed says, "A wedding!" On a Wednesday? I wondered. He assured me it was so. "People celebrate weddings every day!" They fish, they have picnics, they swim, they get married. Gazans, despite all the suffering they’re facing, are not on their knees.

"We have been through all three wars now since 2008 we expect the next one could be this year or next year or after three years or next week," said Mohammed Halaby, who works to try to procure essential items for Gaza in the face of Israel’s economic blockade. "So I would say everybody in Gaza wouldn't like be subject to pressure. They’re being resilient to the situation in general. We don't give up easily."

At the harbor, Rana Dilly told us she just wants a safe life for her kids. In the meantime, the family steals little bits of normalcy at dusk beside the water. “I come here to forget our problems,” Ahmad tells us.

Hours later, I left Gaza for Jerusalem. A wave of sadness passed over me as I bid farewell to Raed and pushed my luggage through a series of clicking metal turnstiles and long concrete hallways, then emptied the contents of my equipment pack into a plastic bin for inspection by Israeli security. I didn’t know when I’d be back.

Photographs by Abdel Kareem Hana

Dispatches from Gaza: July 29 ('I Just Want to Feel Safe')

“I just want to feel safe,” said Abu Ali from his makeshift couch in an al fresco sitting room in the Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiya. The wish is as simple as it is elusive for Abu Ali and nearly everyone else in #Gaza. I’ve heard the phrase repeated again and again over the last week – from refugee camps to the vegetable market; from offices, living rooms, restaurants and hotels; from the beach and the harbor.

“I just want to feel safe.”

For Abu Ali, living near the Israeli border in Shujaiya turns that wish into a mocking fantasy. As we spoke, an Israeli drone buzzed overhead – often a harbinger of another rocket attack. In 2014 Israel leveled a blocks-long section of Shujaiya with 7000 shells in barely an hour. It was an attack so devastating that a retired American general declared, “Holy bejeezus!” He called the rate of fire “astonishing” and “absolutely disproportionate.”

During that war, “I got a call from the Israeli shabak [intelligence], saying, ‘You must leave this area,’” recalled Abu Ali, sitting in the filtered morning light beneath a lattice of grape leaves. Clucking chickens in his vegetable garden can’t quite drown out the sound of the drone. After the Israeli warning, Abu Ali started to move his family to his brother-in-law’s house, but as they left, he recalls, they came under shell fire from Israeli tanks. Eventually, they reached the relative’s house, where they lived for weeks, 50 people in two rooms.

Months after the 2014 war, Abu Ali finallly returned to discover his home – the one he saved to build by working construction in Israel for 30 years – completely destroyed. Over the next year, with funds donated from Saudi Arabia, he rebuilt it, adorning his front entrance with repurposed leftover tank shells. He fears for the next attack. “I want to feel safe. I want to sleep well. I don’t feel relaxed here in my home. Nobody can stop the Israeli attacks. Who pays with their blood? The people.”

The level of death, crippling injury, lasting trauma, sudden homelessness and nonstop fear is difficult to comprehend, much less calculate, outside of a war zone like Gaza. The broader casualty numbers are familiar to anyone who follows the story closely, but what floors me on this trip is learning how much loss individual families endured. One Gazan, now in Ramallah, lost 37 members of her family in the 2014 war. Not a typo. Thirty-seven, including seven young men in a single bombing. “They were not part of any militant organization,” said Tahani Abu Daqqa, former Minister of Culture for the Palestinian Authority; they were just young Palestinian men. Abu Daqqa tells me Israeli rockets also destroyed her Gaza home, even though, after Israeli warnings, it was empty and the neighborhood abandoned. As we spoke her phone kept lighting up and emitting little dings: updates on the evening’s killings from the ongoing Israeli attacks in Gaza, including a 14-year-old boy.

Stories of massive loss come simply for the asking. My translator and guide, Raed Athamneh, lost 18 members of his family, including brothers, uncles, and grandparents, in a 2006 attack, and 56 more were badly wounded. He’s had to rebuild his own home twice. “The important thing in my life is just to feel safe,” he tells me, repeating the Gaza mantra as we stand on a rise above the seashore. “That’s it. I don’t want to be a millionaire, I don’t want to be anything, just to feel safe, and have my kids safe.” A bullet, a bomb, a drone, a plane – from any of those, Raed tells me, “my life could change in minutes.” And so he feels always nervous. Always. “When my wife calls me, I say, ‘what happened?’ Directly I want an answer. What’s going on? Because I don’t feel safe.”

“I just hope for everything to be calm,” he says, fixing his eyes on mine, imagining that day. “I stay with my family, we relax, we enjoy.” Perhaps a summer day on the beach below us, under an umbrella with some barbecue and minted lemonade. No fear, no tension, no terror when family members call him on his cell phone. “Safety life,” Raed tells me.

“I just want to feel safe.”

Abu Ali and Raed Athamneh showing me before and after photos of the destruction of his Shujaiya home in 2014.

Dispatches from Gaza: July 28 ('Land of Sad Oranges')

The late novelist Ghassan Khanafani described his native Palestine as the “land of sad oranges.” Memories of his father gazing at the orange in his hand and “weeping like a helpless child” evoked the disposession of his family as they fled from Acre (Akka), near Haifa, to Lebanon, where they became refugees.

The Gaza Strip itself has in recent decades become a land of sad oranges. #Gaza is made up more than 70 percent by refugees, whose families in 1948 fled and were driven out from the villages and towns near Ashkelon, Ashdod and other communities in what is now Israel. Here, too, what some consider the sweetest oranges on earth have for generations been part of Gaza’s identity.

When I traveled to Gaza in 1997 for a public radio report on Gaza’s water crisis, it was clear the days of the orange groves were numbered. Seawater from overpumping was beginning to intrude into the coastal aquifer, turning drinking water wells brackish; already, 85 percent of those wells were unfit for human consumption. (Now that figure is 97 percent, which is why two thirds of Gazans have their water delivered by truck.) Oranges don’t like salty water, and the small sweet pockets were being guzzled both by large agricultural operations in the nearby Israeli settlements of Gaza (they would not be abandoned for another eight years), and by Gaza’s own orange farmers. “Every year we pump and it goes down and down,” farmer Ali Dehar told me back then.

Today Gaza’s once proud orange industry has shriveled to nearly nothing. “It is like a needle in an island of hay,” said Osama Abu Middain, whose father ran an orange cooperative that sent shiploads of orange crates to Eastern Europe every year. “Hundreds of thousands of boxes.” We visited Abu Middain in Zahra, in central Gaza and near the abandoned Israeli settlement of Netzarim, where he is building a villa near what used to be a large orange grove. His land sits on a tiny pocket of sweet water, but it’s not enough for a viable orange industry. In 2014, Israeli shells destroyed one of his wells, apparently in pursuit of Hamas militants who broke down his door and took refuge on the property to launch attacks against Israeli aircraft. “It was all oranges, to the end,” he says, gesturing toward his property line. “After they shelled the well, I decided to make it olive trees.”

Now we walk down neat sandy lanes, between a scattering of orange trees, date palms, pear trees, and the young olive grove. It is no longer a profitable operation, but Abu Middain, a man of means, does not seem bothered. “What’s between me and the tree is not money. It’s chemistry. I treat it like my kids.”

In the meantime, the few oranges he has left aren’t yet ripe, but some of them are in blossom, and of these remaining few, you can smell their perfume on the breeze.

Photos by Abdel Kareem Hana

Dispatches from Gaza: July 26 (A Whiff of War in the Air)

This morning in #Gaza, a whiff of war in the air in the wake of Israel's deadly overnight air strikes - a shaking of the fragile ceasefire a few days earlier. All week long I’ve been looking into the human consequences of Gaza’s water crisis on the ground here, visiting refugee camps, talking to hydrologists, engineers, officials, UNICEF and other international donors, and chatting with people along the harbor and the beach. This morning, as I spoke with a Hamas water minister, the wail of an ambulance and a slow mournful dirge began drifting through the window: a memorial procession for the three men killed last night.

Surreal and disturbing as it was, the true human stakes of the water disaster here came into focus only when I started talking to pediatricians. One, from the health ministry, told me that he's seen dramatic rises in kidney failure, typhoid fever, hepatitis A, salmonella and severe diarrhea in the children of Gaza - between a 30 and 50 percent rise, he estimated, just over the last few months. Much of this he attributed to water and food contamination, the result of salty well water, water delivery trucks carrying e coli, and food that spoils with only four hours a day of electricity - part of the economic strangulation of Gaza.

In the evening, we met with another pediatrician - Mohamad Abu Samia, director of the Rantisi hospital in Gaza. He told us he's seen doubling cases of gastroenteritis, renal failure, and thyroid cancer, and the rise in a previously rare disease: Blue Baby Syndrome, related to the elevated nitrate levels in the Gaza wells. "Bluish lips, bluish face, bluish skin," the doctor tells me. And blood the color of chocolate. 

Now, he is seeing cases of marasmus, the result of severe malnutrition in infants: "just bone and skin." Not all of these diseases can be traced to poor water quality, but all are related, said the doctor, to Israel's economic blockade. "Before the siege, we didn't have any patients with malnutrition," Abu Samia told me. "Now with the temperature going to 40 (104 Fahrenheit), like in the Gulf: no electricity, no water. So much hard suffering. The siege should be stopped."

Then the doctor led us out of the small examination room and into a quiet ward with some of the sickest babies in Gaza. The room was sectioned by curtains, and he had a few kind words to dazed mothers trying to comfort babies with congenital heart disease, severe malnutrition. The mothers have already lived through three wars and an economic siege. Doctor Abu Samia softly exchanged words with each mom; in one case, he gently lifted the shirt of a tiny infant, revealing a scar from heart surgery nearly half the length of her body. Another was hooked up to a respirator - the minute it stopped, the child would die. And because electricity runs only four hours a day in Gaza, the baby must stay at the hospital, where generators keep her alive. Photos byAbdel Kareem Hana

Dispatches from Gaza: July 25 (A WISH FOR NORMAL LIFE)

A quick greeting tonight from Gaza.

Simple walk along the beach and the harbor as the light faded. Families out in force, gathered around small picnic tables; kids grinning and dripping out of the water in the small stretch of Gaza City beach that is not so badly polluted. A few miles to the north and south, raw sewage pours into the ocean, because there's no electricity to run the sewage plant. We went by Gaza's power plant today - very quiet. The guard at the entry station told us they haven't had power for three days, because the fuel hasn't arrived from Egypt.

Meanwhile, fuel and food shipments have been blocked at the Kerem Shalom crossing, which Israel closed in collective punishment for the incendiary balloons. (Reports are it will be open again this week.)

In the meantime, the wish for some sort of normal life seems to be on everyone's lips. This on the same night that Israeli strikes in other parts of the Gaza Strip would kill three Palestinians.

And yet, as in Beirut in the 1980s and Sarajevo in the 90s, Palestinians in Gaza tonight were out on their beaches, in their parks, on their fishing boats, their heads above water.

Photos by Abdel Kareem Hana