This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI's THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI's THE WORLD is the program audio.
LISA MULLINS: All the news coverage and the rhetoric mean little to civilians caught in the middle of the Gaza conflict. One of them is Sameh Habeeb. Sameh Habeeb is a 23-year-old. He lives in Gaza City, and he's been keeping a blog during the conflict. Our colleagues at Public Broadcasting's Youth Radio are staying in touch with him. Sameh Habeeb says that the sounds of the violence are impossible to ignore.
SAMEH HABEEB: One of the rockets exploded in a nearby area. Okay. Oops. Oh, boy. Can you hear? That is like F-16 bombings and we don't sleep from scared of bombings that took place continuously here since the start of this war. My family and I were debating about leaving the house because it's no longer safe. We were saying, “Where to go? There's no place safe in Gaza Strip.†Even, like, my sister invited us all to her house. Her house is adjacent to another house that was bombed three days ago. So no safe place in Gaza. We don't know where to go. We do not have enough water. We do not have enough fuel, not enough gas, enough power, everything is being diminishing here in the Gaza Strip. There is a lot of talking about tunnels, so let me just point out about this crucial point. The tunnels were used as like a flourishing market for goods and commodities here in the Gaza Strip since we did not have open crossings with Israel. But when the war here started, the tunnels were destroyed and no longer food were getting into the Gaza Strip. And this created a very bad and negative impact on the market. So people were not able to get bread, were not able to get all kinds of food and stuff that was strongly needed at the moment.
MULLINS: You can read Sameh Habeeb's blog and see some of his photographs at theworld.org. And as for those tunnels beneath the Gaza-Israel border, the tunnels he mentioned, Israel takes a very different view of them. In addition to being conduits for food and other essentials, Israel says the tunnels are used by Hamas to smuggle weapons -- that includes rockets -- that are regularly fired over the border into Israel. Israel wants guarantees that the
tunnel smuggling will stop before it signs a truce. And to that end, United States has reportedly promised Egypt $33 million worth of equipment to detect the underground passages.
transcript
Sameh Habeeb's blog