Many have been traumatised by the fighting and some children in our programmes have been injured and even killed.

At a health and nutrition centre supported by Save the Children, I met mums who were getting basic food for their malnourished children.

A truckload of 100 baby kits, 150 hygiene kits, and more than 1,400 packs of nappies - prepared by Save the Children - are transported into Gaza.

One in ten children are stunted in Gaza, their families unable to afford basic fruit and vegetables that will help them to physically and mentally develop.

In Gaza, teachers face overcrowded classrooms, with children eager to learn. But there aren’t enough classrooms for them – the UN says they need 230 more schools to accommodate Gaza’s children.

So, children study in 3 shifts. Two little boys I met at an amazing library supported by Save the Children said they wanted to be a doctor and pilot respectively.

School demolition

The budding pilot said he wanted to fly from Gaza airport – but I know there is no airport to fly from and sadly he may never pass through the checkpoint to complete his studies.

Life is also tough in the West Bank. One Bedouin community I met – part of the Jahalin tribe – brought alive the tragedy and trial facing many children.

Their little school attended by 85 children is on its last legs as its facing demolition. The school was set up by the community after they could no longer afford the bus fare for their children to Jericho and after two children were killed hitch hiking on the road.

Hope

The community had lost their income when they were banned from grazing their animals and banned from accessing Jerusalem’s market to sell their wares.

On top of this they have now lost access to their only source of clean water. This little school is a beacon of hope for the community. Destroying it would be a tragedy not just for the 85 children who attend but for the cause of hope and for justice.

Despite these challenges there is hope. At the Qalandiya Girls School, Save the Children supports a group of amazing girls working to see change in their communities.

Better future

They want to travel and study and make a real difference to their communities. But they worry about shootings, arrests and checkpoints and how, as girls, their lives are more difficult than boys.

They want to stop early marriage and be able to choose their career. They are determined and I came away inspired by their hope of a better future. I hope one day soon we’ll see Israeli and Palestinian children play together side by side.

Justin was accompanied on his trip to Gaza and the West Bank to visit Save the Children programmes by former foreign secretary David Miliband, and Telegraph columnist Mary Riddell.

• You can read more about their experiences and insights in Mary Riddell’s Telegraph column and David Miliband’s article in The Guardian.
• Find out more about our work with children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory

Photo handed out by Eglantyne Jebb in Trafalgar Square in 1919

90 years later we picked an equally difficult subject – the conflict in Gaza. We challenged the UK public to act, again using an emotive image. This campaign had an incredible effect – generating the largest ever UK SMS petition (200,000 in just a few days), ultimately raising millions for to help children and their families through our programme work in Gaza. We also know this helped spur our government to take a strong line on the conflict.

Emotionally powerful image used to generate support for our Gaza campaign

We haven’t shied away from taking and using powerful images but we also understand that photography can have a negative impact – both on how our audiences percieve the developing world and on the lives of those we represent. So we wanted to find out how we can depict injustice but do it in an ethical way.

After a bit of digging around we discovered that no one had done any comprehensive research into what communities felt about the way they are represented in photos.  So this is the challenge we’ve taken on!

We set off to find out what communities in Afghanistan, Gaza, Kenya and India thought not just about the photos of themselves but also about how they felt about being photographed and whether they knew why their photo was being taken and what it was going to be used for.

I’d be interested to hear what people think.

I’ll be keeping you up to date with how the project progresses.

Then I had an opportunity to be in the West Bank again for various meetings. One day, I accompanied a crew from al-Jazeera to one of our projects in south Hebron in the southern West Bank. I was facilitating access for the journalists so they could see the situation for children there, but it was also an opportunity to see new parts of my country that I have never seen.

The plan was to visit some Palestinian villages that are located in Area C, areas within the West Bank under full Israeli control, where Palestinians are not allowed to build houses, schools and health centres, or even make repairs to their homes or agricultural lands.

The situation for communities living here is so critical that, according to our most recent research, rates of stunting in children in Area C are double that of children living in Gaza.

General view for Susya tent village, located in Area "C" south of Heberon, south of West Bank

We drove past several villages in South Hebron, including At-Tuwani and Imneizel, where Palestinians are living without the basic necessities of life, just a few meters away from Israeli settlements with superior infrastructure and facilities.

Honestly, what I saw up until this point was nothing in comparison to what I witnessed in Susya village – a village of tents. Before stepping out of our vehicle, I noted the digital display showing the outdoor temperature was 40 degrees Celsius. I stepped into the heat with a colleague from a local partner and we began to look for children who could tell us what life was like there for them. Oddly we found no children in the tents. We were just about to give up when suddenly I saw the head of a little boy. I thought he was walking towards me but he disappeared. I immediately thought he had fallen, so I ran behind the mountain to find him. I couldn’t believe what I saw.

Mohammed, 3, is playing with a watermelon inside a cave near Susya village, south of the West Bank

Several children were sheltering inside a cave in the mountain because it was the coolest area in the whole village. “Oh My God! Are we in 2010?” I asked myself.

I spent most of my time with Mohammed, a 3-year-old boy who seemed more interested in playing with a watermelon that his grandfather brought to him than speaking with me. I started playing with the watermelon too, as I continued speaking with Mohammed’s grandfather.

They told me that their story began in 1985. This is what they said:

The residents of Susya village were evicted from their homes at the hands of the Israeli military. Israeli settlers then inhabited the area and the Palestinians refused to leave their land so they started digging caves. The Israeli military closed most of their caves, so the residents set up tents. The Israeli military destroyed many of their tents too. The grandfather of Mohammed said that a few week earlier Israeli settlers, who are living meters away, came around 2:30 am and set fire to two of their tents.

The entrance of the cave near Susya village where Mohammed, 3, shelters from the sun

From speaking with the children and their families, I learned that children here feel insecure. They are underweight and malnourished because of a lack of fresh and nutritious foods. It’s also difficult for them to get to school or to a doctor because an Israeli military ban on Palestinians using the local roads means they must walk to the closest school and medical centre 3 km away through mountainous roads in the burning heat. The good news is that despite these difficulties, children are still going to school, feeling that it’s essential to securing a better future.

During my visit the only thing that made me feel a little bit better is that Save the Children is prioritizing Area C in its programmes and is helping children and their families through counselling support, the provision of much-needed school supplies (books, stationary, etc) and by rehabilitating and repairing houses and lands where possible.

A small windmill in Susya tent village. It's the only source for electricity for the 20 families living in the village, and is sufficient to operate only one small TV when there's strong winds.

We spent a day filming with 12-year-old Mohammed and his family in Al Atatra, a rural area in the north of the Gaza Strip. The idea was to catch up with Mohammed one year after he was first filmed for Save the Children during what they call “el harb” (the war), otherwise known as the Israeli military offensive Operation “Cast Lead.”

Back then, Mohammed and his family were living in a school turned temporarily into a shelter for those whose houses were in the line of fire. And Mohammed’s family lived in a 4×5 metre classroom alongside another 50-60 men, women and children. In that first report, Mohammed was visibly shaken by the whole experience and said he wasn’t able to sleep.

Twelve months on, the whole family are now back in their own house. When they first returned, his father said they couldn’t even recognise their own street, the destruction was so bad. They were relieved to find their home still standing (many were not), albeit heavily damaged by shelling and peppered with bullet holes.

Mohammed told us how his home, which had been occupied by Israeli soldiers, was covered in broken glass and furniture. Their clothes had been ripped up, and there was dog-shit all over the place.

The list of destruction is endless. Other low-lights include the TV and computer that Mohammed used to play on, and almost everything on his father’s small piece of farmland, including olive trees, crops of spinach, potatoes, strawberries, sage, thyme, and hundreds of honey-producing bees that were killed-off by dropping internationally outlawed white phosphorus. His 21 sheep had also been left for dead. “What did they do?” his father asked.

I found Mohammed to be the sweetest, most sensitive 12-year-old boy you could meet. He initially sat a little nervously eating his breakfast with his cousin on the kitchen floor (no furniture, remember), but like most children we have met here he soon began to began to talk and recalled with frightening clarity the nightmare of the war. He told us he still doesn’t sleep well and his father says that at night, if he’s thirsty, he’s too scared to go to the next room to fetch a glass of water.

Buildings are reduced to rubble all over Gaza. Not just (Hamas) government offices but ordinary homes and many schools too. No wonder Mohammed cannot sleep. He constantly worries that the soldiers will come back. The problem is that his worry is not without foundation. Operation Cast Lead was not a unique event, but rather part of a cyclical pattern of violence against Gaza’s children.

It’s tough to be optimistic having heard so many horrifying stories, but at least Mohammed holds on to some hope…

“I wish that both sides can come together in peace, and there will be no more shooting, or aeroplanes, or bombs, or anything.”

Here here, Mohammed.

I’m not a psychologist; I’m just a simple documentation, communications and media person working in this field for almost 8 years. However, I’m a fan of psychology books and have learned many things about this human science that are especially related to the psychology and mental health of someone living in Gaza for more than 11 years.

Recently, I was selected to join the training of Save the Children’s new Global Standby team in the UK, which I considered as an  achievement of one of my life’s dreams.

I applied for a UK visa, and I knew at that time that it was a little bit late — but that wasn’t the main problem.

The real problem was, after getting my UK visa, that I had to arrange travel to the UK from Gaza, which has been under intensive blockade, for more than two years.

This meant that after getting the UK visa, I needed to get a Jordanian visa, because I’m a holder of a Gaza ID, and all Palestinians holding a Gazan ID card are not allowed to enter Jordan unless they have a special permit.

After getting a UK and Jordan visa, I coordinate with the Israeli authorities to cross the famous Gaza-Israel crossing, known as Erez, and then travel to Allenby bridge, cross into Jordan, spend a night in Amman, and then fly to the UK! What a nice trip?!

The other option is to leave Gaza through the Gaza-Egypt border, or Rafah Crossing, which is another heart attack. This border is mainly closed after Hamas took over Gaza by force. Now, the Rafah Crossing is opened for only two days every two months. There, I need to register with the Hamas authorities in Gaza to allow me out, and I need a very very special coordination to cross into Egypt, otherwise I will be deported (as a criminal) from Rafah to Cairo International Airport, staying there (in the basement) until the time of my flight to the UK.

Even if I had been fortunate enough to make it out this way, after the end of the training, I would have had to stay in Cairo airport’s basement (The Hotel of Gazans) on my way back to Gaza from the UK,  until the border opened again, after around one month.

Anyhow, the Global Standby Team training started before I obtained my UK visa, which meant no Jordanian visa nor Israeli nor Egyptian coordination!

On 08.11.2009 (the first day of the training) I felt so frustrated, and I was looking at all the emails that I received from the training team telling me how to go from Heathrow airport to our office in London, and started imagining how it would be if I were able to go.

A part of me felt happy that I was feeling sad! In Gaza we start to forget that we are living in unnatural living conditions. We begin to feel less sad that we aren’t able to leave Gaza; when there is gun firing on the beach, we don’t feel that this is an assault against us — so long as the bullets don’t reach us. We begin to feel that the daily incursions taking place aren’t as dangerous as they really are.

I do think this part of the negative resilience; we’re becoming resilient to a level where we can forget that this situation is not a normal one.

We need to be reminded that we are resilient people living in a weird situation. Unfortunately we, as Palestinians living in Gaza, have reached a point where we consider the unnatural to be natural.

Public view for the Jiftlik village in the middle of the Jordan Valley

I was asked by my supervisor, Jennifer Moorehead, to prepare myself, my recorder, and my camera to visit the Jordan Valley, where we’re implementing an important protection project to help Palestinians who have been forcibly displaced to the Jordan Valley.

I was so excited to be going there, because it was my first visit ever to the Valley. But when I arrived, it was so different from anywhere else in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I saw clay homes with metal roofs in an area famous for its burning heat in the summer and children walking at least 1.5 kilometers to their schools because there is no proper public transportation system. I was most shocked when I found out that Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley are still without electricity, and that they only get water once a week for less than 24 hours!

As part of my job, I conducted several interviews with children and families who have benefited from our programme to renovate kindergartens and build homes. Two of the families I met were so eager to meet me and to deliver a message of gratitude to Save the Children for the 1,000 liter water tanks we have distributed to them.  Despite the continuous water shortages, the water tanks have provided them with a stable water source in their homes for the very first time.

Adeeba, 56 years old, stands in front of part of her home, which was rennovated by Save the Children UK as part of the Prevention and Protection project in the Jiftlik village in the middle of the Jordan Valley

On the way back to the office, I was trying to make some kind of comparison between the situation I’m living in in Gaza to the Jordan Valley, but it was difficult to compare – the difficulties they are facing are so extreme.

For me, I have been doing the communication and documentation work for these sectors, where I’m used to meet with affected children and their families, listen to their stories, which are painful in sometimes, and lessons to be learnt from in other times. This kind of work put me under some pressure, which was reflected on my performance with less number of case studies that I was supposed to do, because I became little bit tired of listening to the painful stories of children and their experiences, which could be described at the minimum as Grave Violation to the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC).

This sphere that I was living in ended when the following happened: I was instructed to go and make some photo documentation of one of our projects to rehabilitate agricultural lands and roads, I was driving a Save the Children vehicle, which is clearly marked with Save the Children logo through three stickers and one large flag (this is usually how vehicles are used in areas of Emergency for security and visibility reasons), while driving I was stopping amid a traffic jam in front of Al-Shifa’ hospital, which is the main hospital for all of Gaza, where a young man in his 30s using a wheel chair came over and asked me to talk for a while.

I immediately stopped and stepped down to see what he wants, his name was Mostafa and he said: “The car you are driving says that you work for Save the Children, can’t you consider me as a child and save my future??!!!” Many people say that I’m good speaker, but after what Mostafa said, for the first time ever, I didn’t how to respond, I had nothing to say, the only thing I felt I should do is I hugged him and started talking to him about the specialized organizations for his case, and those he can find in Gaza as well as giving him all of my contact details so Mostafa can be in direct contact with me if he needs any further assistance, I wanted to spend as much time as I can just to tell him that even if we in Save the Children cannot do some direct intervention because of his age, we are still there to assist him and others to have better future.

The most important thing is what happened with me; after leaving Mostafa I felt that I’m cheered up again, and I should stop being pressured by listening to the painful experiences of the innocent children, because I saw my goal again, which is to work through Save the Children on securing a better future for the children, especially that if we were not there to listen to them, no one will be, and we might be able not to see many cases like Mostafa in the future.

A lady dries her clothes between two tents - and I worry about windows?

This (indoor) pressure comes in line with the daily (outdoor) scenes that I witness during my field work as a Documentation and Communication Officer for Save the Children in Gaza. As part of the job I have just seen a young woman hanging the washed clothes for drying on a rope that was set between two tents in a camp for Palestinians who lost their homes during the recent Israeli offensive. I thought I was having problems for not having windows, while those people do not have HOMES. I just realized that word ‘home’ doesn’t mean an apartment or a back yard, it means much more.

The end of the day was supposed to be in one of the kindergartens benefiting from the Emergency Response of Save the Children in Gaza. I visited this kindergarten before to conduct case studies, and it was a great surprise for me and a gift at the same time to be received by the 5-year-old girl, Jenin, who said Hi Osamaaaa. I didn’t believe that she still remembered my name until I asked her to repeat it again, and she did smiling!!

At that moment I forgot all the hurting scenes I’m facing on a daily basis, and just got the belief again of the need to continue what I’m doing with Gazan children, because being remembered by a 5-year-old child is an indescribable feeling.

The girl who said hi - with the Save the Children doll that made her smile... and remember me?

Today I was supposed to do a case study with a child benefiting from our Health Programme Response, which takes place in two tents in the Ezbet Abed Rabbou area, north of Gaza -  the same area Jasmine visited. I was shocked to see almost all of the tents down because of the rain and winds that hit Gaza today and yesterday. Mercifully, this winter’s rains are lighter than most years, but  the conflict could not have happened at a worse time of year.

We found some of the people who had been sheltering  in the tents taking refuge in partially destroyed houses nearby. So people who lost their homes completely and  then their tents are now getting  ‘shelter ‘ inside homes without windows or doors, and in some cases they are without walls even. So even the houses displaced people are using can not be  described as ‘shelter’.

Our two clinic tents were moved to a nearby house, also without windows but our colleagues put some plastic sheeting up in place of the glass. This is considered a temporarily location for the clinic, because the response was meant to have the health service in the same area where the displaced people are, so the tents will be set up again to help them – some of the people in Gaza in greatest need of help.

These clinics are part of our project to help young children and pregnant women who have been displaced by the conflict get the essential basic healthcare they need. We’re setting up clinics in four locations in the north of Gaza and in Gaza City, all of them are in tents, where we make the first medical check in the tents, and after that we refer the cases in need to the clinics inside Gaza and Jabalia Cities. This means that we are worried about the other clinics also being flattened by the rain. Using clinics like these we’ll be able to help around 5,000 young children and 1,600 pregnant women. We can never be sure that any future rain won’t destroy the tents again, we can only hope and always be ready to use alternative locations in times of  wind and rain.

But our health clinics are only a couple of the scores of tents that I’ve  become used to seeing around Gaza in recent weeks. Today, most are looking even sorrier and very wet.

These poor people sheltering in the ruins of Ezbet Abed Rabbou became refugees after the 1948 war, then suffered in the 1967 war, lost their homes in the Israeli offensive in January 2009, and now lose their TENTS to the rain of February 2009. What else they should face? 

After spending a couple of hours talking to the children there and learning more about their suffering , it  made me believe in the increasing importance of continuing what I’m doing as a staff member of Save the Children, and to make sure that Gaza and its people are at the top of colleagues’ priorities at Head Office, as I’m sure they are dealing with other similar suffering of children in different other locations of this world.

The thing I would like to end with is that I went to that location having a dark image of many things, and instead of the image getting much darker after having that experience in Exbet Abed Rabbou; the laughs of the children there and the wet dark hair of the girls playing under the rain made me see a real light in the end of a long dark tunnel, this light that we should bring to those children through continuing to assist and help Gazan children and getting more support to them.

We drive through residential areas, some houses are totally untouched, other with windows blown out but I would say ¾ of the houses have been flattened. Amongst the rubble I spot a little boy maybe only three years old, just like my son when he was a toddler. He was playing amongst the rubble. Seeing that little one, on his own, that was shocking to me.

Our first stop was an area where about 400 families are living in tents. Their homes have been bombed. The tents are tiny, overcrowded and offer little or no protection from the wind and the temperature drops to 7° C at night.

Here we visit a clinic set up by Save the Children’s local partners. As a woman I am allowed to go into the antenatal clinic and I am stunned. As the tent flaps in the wind I am shuffled along the dirt floor to see a worn-out examination chair and vintage scanning machine hitched up to a generator rumbling away outside the tent. The staff look exhausted but they continue to struggle on with no clean water and basic equipment.

Life goes on, as they say. 3,500 children have been born since the fighting began so this clinic is vital but clearly under resourced. What a nightmare. I can only think of the stark contrast from my experience when I was pregnant and my first scan.

We drive on and stop at some of Save the Children’s emergency playschools: child friendly spaces. One is in a tent, another in a donated building. The staff are amazing organising dancing and singing, but I still feel the children are very subdued. We would normally run art projects to help them get over the trauma of the fighting. They would draw pictures and we would run arts and craft workshops but due to the tight border restrictions it’s impossible to get hold of paper. This really hits me, how limiting these border restrictions are. What’s wrong with paper, what harm can it do?

Later on I meet a woman whose baby was born two days before the fighting started. She’s attending a project we are running on water and hygiene. Dirty water is a serious problem, causing diarrhoea and in these situations diarrhoea can easily kill children if untreated. As well as providing water tanks we are teaching people how to conserve water and basic emergency hygiene skills. As I’m leaving the woman holds up her baby and says “Please take our message to the world, we’re peaceful people, our children are innocent.”

Throughout my visit I am shocked to hear stories from our staff, our driver lost five members of his family whilst out distributing food parcels. We need more funding to support the Save the Children team here. They have been working round the clock and none of them have been able to take a break since June 2007 when all Palestinians were barred from leaving Gaza. They can’t go on much longer. Please can someone help sponsor an aid worker? I’m serious…

The Save the Children team here are doing what they can to help with the resources they have, what needs to happen is for the boarders to open so that people can start making a living and to return to a normal life. In the meantime we need your help.