Drlzzeldin Abuelaish, a remarkable obstetrician whose
five daughters were killed in an Israeli airstrike in January 2009.
His anguished telephone call moments after their death
to an Israeli television presenter and friend
was broadcast live to shocked audiences.
His book, 'I Shall Not Hate',
was a testimony to an extraordinary capacity to overcome.
"Hate is a poison, a fire which burns you
from the inside," he said at his family's home
which then still bore the scars of the shelling,
in Jabalia in northern Gaza.
"It's easy to destroy life but very difficult to build it.”
UN warned that Gaza was rapidly becoming uninhabitable.
But this is not as a result of a natural disaster -
an earthquake, say, or a typhoon -
but of destruction, de-development,
suffocation and isolation
caused by the deliberate policies of Israel and Egypt,
with significant contributory factors from both Hamas and Fatah.
And the material and psychological siege of
Gaza has profound consequences not just for the
population, but also for regional security.
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