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From the Ashes of our Misery: A series on hope in the midst of occupation.

Rafah, Occupied Gaza, Summer 2007.

I never felt closer to hell than when I was in Rafah. Yet this hell is full of people who did nothing to deserve their damnation. Under the suffocating shell of devastation there are lives, families, joys, passions, lovers and friends. During the height of the current intifada in the first few years of the millennium Israel demolished thousands of houses in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. The scope of destruction and violence that took place in Rafah is beyond nightmare. It's the stuff of maniacal imagination. I looked up and down multi-mile long stretches of earth, 200 yards wide, that used to be neighborhoods and businesses, family's homes and livelihood. I met husbands who lost wives, children who lost parents, grandmothers who watched their grandchildren die...Rafah is Auschwitz...Rafah is the shame of humanity, that we would let such an atrocity take place without acting.

Nikon D200, Sigma 10-20mm EX