Gaza is always full of surprises.
This visit, I was soon to discover, wasn’t going to disappoint. Young men throwing themselves from roofs of buildings for fun to world-class shawarma stylishly served in Gaza’s newest restaurant rising from the rubble of war.
Things were very different in July 2014 during the last Gaza war.
Israeli jets were pounding the small strip of land, destroying buildings and killing fighters and civilians in response to Hamas rocket attacks.
Let me take you back for a moment: The war had really started a few hundred miles away in the West Bank, when three Israeli teens were abducted and murdered. Israel blamed Hamas.
The retaliatory abduction and murder of a Palestinian teen wound tensions in the region to a fever pitch.
There followed a dramatic escalation in the number of rockets Hamas was firing into Israel and after a failed attempt by militants to storm into its territory, Israel launched the so-called Operation Protective Edge.
The war lasted six or so weeks and by the time a ceasefire was agreed, some 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 68 Israelis, mostly soldiers, had been killed.
At its height, the crossing into Gaza was often closed, and slowed to a crawl at other times.
So, the first surprise was a relatively pain-free crossing from Israel through the Erez junction crossing, not a first but always nice.
To get in to Gaza, you need to be a credentialed aid worker or journalist — some diplomats gain access too.
It’s like an airport but you carry your own bags all the way. After passport control, there’s no jet way to a waiting plane, instead long metal corridors funnel you to the entry turnstiles.
The surprise was small but very pleasant.
At a turnstile, Israeli border guards remotely activated a door to the side and, with our bags teetering dangerously on an overladen cart, we wobbled through.
We’d been saved from humping and heaving them on and off the trolley through the turnstile.
Next came the kilometer-long cage that contains the concrete walkway to the Gazan gatekeepers.
Nice surprise two, a motorbike trailing a big baggage barrow was waiting.
Once loaded, we sped towards the Palestinian passport checkers, past a poster warning departing Palestinians not to be pressured by Israeli police.
As if a reminder were needed, trust between Palestinian and Israeli officials is at a low ebb. The sprawling but secure crossing complex is a sterile statement on how that gulf is bridged.
I won’t count the surprises, but for the record the next is number three.
Banksy — the elusive British graffiti artist — had been to Gaza recently. Before anyone noticed, he sneaked in, left his mark, and was gone. There were four works, and by chance we drove past a couple. One has already been impounded by the police.
Controversy surrounds ownership: Banksy gifted them to Gaza, while in New York or London they could have made him a tidy six or seven-figure sum.
I saw his graffiti cat, sprayed on a house wall and freshly caged. His lucky “owner” had just erected a chicken coop structure — a wood-and-wire mess — around the artwork.
It looked to me like it would barely keep out a fox — never mind a wily cat burglar or committed thief. Anyway, it was a nice surprise and the cute cat put a smile on my face.
I met Gaza’s youthful and spring-legged Parkour team too. Not at all what you’d expect in a strip more famed for fighters than sportsmen.
But there they were in their bright yellow T-shirts launching themselves in great death-defying salvos atop the crumpled concrete and angry twisted rebar wreckage of last summer’s war.
All 12 of them were committed to nothing more than the feeling of freedom in flight — however brief — and the hope that this sport could catapult them beyond Gaza’s borders to a better life.
This possibility came maybe a little closer recently.
The team was spotted by the popular Middle East TV show “Arabs Got Talent,” which might just have the pull to make their dreams come true and get them out of Gaza — if they can show they’ve got real talent.
In a tiny strip just 41 kilometers (25 miles) long, by six to 12 kilometers across, crammed with 1.8 million people, most of them under 30, it’s perhaps no surprise that conditions should throw up a Parkour team.
Competitive soccer, which for so many aspiring youngsters worldwide offers a ticket to riches, always seemed a nonstarter here.
In these youngsters, I found something else perhaps unsurprising: Unlike their parents, they have little understanding of the Israelis beyond the fence — because they have no connection with them.
Some of the team were still children, not even in high school, when Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. Their parents were once able to pass to Israel for work with relative ease, but since withdrawal the wall has become a barrier only their imagination can leap. Beyond it they fear evils that ignorance amplifies.
Their parents had relationships with Israelis, understood them, knew them as people — not as figures of fear and hate.
When I first came to Gaza two decades ago, the Erez junction crossing of today, with its steel corridors and caged walkways wasn’t there. We walked down the road past long lines of Palestinians on their way to work in Israel. Today a tiny trickle passes through.
But here’s the next surprise. Well it was to me anyway. Abdu Salim, in his sparkling, spanking new restaurant. There are pristine white tablecloths, creases neatly rising from the wood beneath, and clean, oh so clean.
That’s of itself something a little unexpected amid the dust and, sometimes, squalor that can be Gaza. But the real surprise I had was when Abdu told me he bought this place as the bombs were still falling last summer.
It was a hideously brave investment in a semi-derelict property in the middle of a war wrapped in an enduring conflict.
But the gamble seems to be paying off, customers are coming not just because it’s clean and tidy but because the food, particularly his shawarma, is so good. It has already achieved legendary status here. The best in town we were told.
What I wouldn’t have guessed is where he earned his culinary chops. He told me it was in Israel — at restaurants in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — where he used to work when the Erez crossing was more open.
Working in kitchens there taught him not just how to make great food but helped fuel and finance his ambition to open his own business. He employs 40 people now.
He remembers those days, and understands Israelis well enough, he thinks, to get along with them. He wants peace, not just because it’s good for business but because he can see the two sides moving further apart. But he’s not sure his leaders can deliver that peace.
Abdu wasn’t the only person of his generation I talked to whose fears oscillate between anger at Israelis and frustration with their own leaders. They fear what the future holds for their children, whose estrangement from Israeli youth seems to be a one-way ticket to continued conflict.
Ehab Bakr from one of the first families of Gaza’s fishing fraternity has more reason than most to be angry with Israel. He lost a son and grandson during the war last summer. Not long after, he had a stroke.
His boys were playing on the beach. He says Israeli shells intended for Hamas fighters killed them. But what really hurts Ehab today is that he can’t help his son who survived. The 13-year-old is still traumatized by the shelling and nothing his father does, no doctor he takes him to, can help.
He has nightmares, doesn’t sleep, gets angry easily in a way he never did before, sometimes stiffens up and appears to choke on his own tongue.
Ehab’s own politicians haven’t helped him he says. He supports the internationally recognized Palestinian Fatah party, which controls Gaza with Hamas — a group the U.S. and Europe considers a terrorist organization. In Ehab’s view, both Fatah and Hamas only look out for their own interests.
If there were peace, he says he could leave Gaza and get his son the treatment he needs.
But perhaps what blew me away the most this visit, was to meet a man who’d lost so much. His house — which looked as if it had once been a place of some comfort — has been reduced by an Israeli strike to a crippled concrete shell.
Ehab cooked tea for us in a blackened teapot balanced on burning wood in an old car wheel — not the kitchen appliance he had here a year ago, and not one you are going to find in any local store here either.
The houses on all sides were similarly blighted. His neighborhood sits atop a small hill overlooking the Israeli border fence. Hamas, whom most people in Gaza fear to cross, had a network of tunnels here.
Ehab told me he has warned Hamas not to build tunnels under his house again. If they do that he said, when I rebuild my house Israel will knock it down again. Right now he’s not making any repairs, nearby are large mounds of freshly dug, damp soil which means only one thing. A new tunnel is already under construction.
That he was so brave to criticize Hamas publicly was a surprise none on our team expected, and no one was expecting what he said next either.
An issue upon which many Israeli/Palestinian peace talks stumble is the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Millions have been scattered beyond Israel’s borders since 1948.
Ehab told us that holding out for those returns — rather than settling for peace — only serves Palestinian’s political leaders, not the people. He is frustrated by his leaders and told me he wants Arabs and Jews to agree a peace.
He fears another cycle of violence where once again he will be one of the biggest losers. Viewed from where he stands today any investment in his house will be wasted, if he rebuilds and Hamas continues its tunneling more conflict is inevitable.
Of course as much as Gaza is full of surprises, like this man’s outspoken criticism of Hamas, it also delivers on expectations too.
No one I met fully trusts Israel and they want it held accountable for its actions.
Back at the Erez crossing, I can’t help but wonder how much more the security here may need to be enhanced in the coming years.
The fear of so many of Gaza’s adults that the gulf between their children and Israelis is growing stays fresh in my mind.
Still, I’m looking forward to coming back for my next round of surprises.
