Noticeable Changes

Azzam Salim used to be one of the leading construction contractors in the central Gaza Strip. Today, however, he spends most of his days idly chatting with other unemployed friends near a bank that he helped build several years ago. "As a human first and foremost, I need to live normally like before." Rami Almeghari reports from the occupied Gaza S […]

On 4 October, Ashraf Abu Suleiman, a 16-year-old from Gaza's Jabaliya refugee camp, went to the northwest coast town of Sudaniya to visit an ill school friend. The teen then went to the sea, where he rolled up the legs of his pants, waded into the water and enjoyed the late summer morning. Minutes later, Ashraf was running in blind terror as Israeli sol […]

Like many other children in the region, 10-year-old Hiba Hammad from the northern Gaza Strip witnessed atrocities by the Israeli army against the population of Gaza during its assault on the coastal strip last winter. Hiba's smiled returned only after four months of intensive psychological therapy at the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Democracy and C […]

"This is my story, the story of an Arab woman," Wadad Makdisi Cortas states in the opening line of her memoir A World I Loved. Born Wadad Makdisi in Beirut in 1909, which at that time was considered a part of Syria, she discovered Arab nationalism at a young age and lived a life true to the idea in every sense. Cortas believed passionately that Ara […]

Cartoonist Naji al-Ali was a towering figure in the Palestinian cultural and political scene. His daily political drawings were a knife-twisting, gut-wrenching journey into how Palestinians perceived their predicament. Toufic Haddad reviews A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali for The Electronic Intifada. […]

International relations specialist Anne Le More's first monograph, International Assistance to the Palestinians after Oslo, the first in Routledge's Studies on the Arab-Israeli Conflict series, provides an important critique of the belief that reconstruction, development and humanitarian aid form essential counterparts to political processes aimed […]

Since the end of August, construction equipment in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, near the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, has stood unused after the Lebanese State Council granted a two month moratorium for the reconstruction of the camp. Nahr al-Bared, home to approximately 30,000 refugees, was destroyed during a three-month-long battle […]

BEIRUT (IRIN) - The politics of the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms, a rugged sliver of mountainside wedged between Lebanon, Israel and Syria, have long overshadowed what some Lebanese environmentalists call "the real issue" of the disputed area: its water resources. Now activists are calling for hydro-diplomacy to take precedence over political mane […]

Nostalgia, insists architect and academic Rami Daher, is a legitimate feeling. While most individuals' instinctive thoughts of the glories of Levantine architecture might run to ancient mosques, castles and palaces, Daher's yearning is towards an era in living memory, and on a more everyday scale. Sarah Irving reports for Electronic Lebanon. […]

American political cartoonist Daryl Cagle shares his recent visit to Palestine on his blog, also sharing the work of Palestinian cartoonists he met there.

At Do Unto Others, Samuel Nichols writes that Israeli military patrols have started setting fire to cars which are caught trying to cross the border from the West Bank into Israel. He posts a video here.

Lina Al Sharif, blogging at 360 km2 of Chaos, describes the trip around Gaza that she made with her university friends, and shows us a video of some of the places visited.

Thai Prison Life chronicles the life of prisoners inside the prisons of Thailand.

Indi.ca wonders about the authenticity of a news report that a netizen named Gayan Rajapakse was arrested in Sri Lanka for ‘web comments’.

The operation against the Taliban in South Waziristan has triggered a wave of retaliations by the Taliban and has forced over 120,000 locals to flee from their houses. Bloggers discuss the plights of these internally displaced people.

In the French-speaking Caribbean, celebrating "La Toussaint", All Saints' and All Souls' Days, are as much an opportunity for family reunions as the Christmas season is. Here is a review of what the blogosphere says about it this year...

Blogger Imaniyé from Martinique reports the creation of a Facebook group [Fr] by people who are eager to defend the rights of Martinicans to comb their hair as they want and above all to twist it into dreadlocks, without being discriminated against.

In the midst of the International Creole Month, Guadeloupean blogger CaribCreoleOne discusses [Fr] the now official use of Creole language alongside French in all the administrative procedures and places, in the city of Le Port in Reunion.