MIDDLE EAST:The car swings in from the sea and drops us outside the gate to the grand new stone, glass and steel terminal that Israel built at the entrance/exit of one of the world's most densely populated and poorest stretches of land, writes, Michael Jansen
The building rises above the sand like a broad-beamed pagoda. Shipping containers and crumbling ruins have been carted or bulldozed away so the aspect of this elegant gate house is not sullied. Salah and I wheel our bags towards an Israeli concrete security box at the gate. Our passports are examined and we get the go-ahead to proceed.
A guard with a rifle slung over a shoulder glances as we enter the empty hall and present documents at separate glass booths. The blonde woman soldier dealing with me asks how long I plan to say. "A couple of days." She pushes my passport and press card back through the tray.
Salah and I begin the journey from Israel's green and pleasant coast into the Gaza Strip, passing through a barred revolving gate, a heavy steel door, another gate, then a sea-breeze-cooled passage fenced with heavy wire and covered with a precast roof that belongs at a funfair, not a passage to hell.
The last stage is the old walkway, enclosed in the same eight-metre-high concrete slabs used for the West Bank wall and covered in netting.
We swelter at the final gate until an Israeli presses the button to open it wide enough for us to pass through and two men on the other side to make good their escape. No one scrutinises our passports here. The Palestinian interior ministry post no longer exists. Gaza is open to all who dare to enter.
We walk out of the corridor into a blasted and bulldozed landscape, drag our bags for half a kilometre across sand and rubble to the highway where Israel permits cars to wait for passengers.
Our car turns and weaves its way through an obstacle course of lumps of cement. Paper, plastic bags and mounds of rubbish litter the verge and the expanse of dirty sand along the road. The stench of rotting garbage and sewage reminds us we are in Gaza. "None of the sewage treatment plants operate properly," says Salah. Vast lakes of raw sewage at Beit Lahia threaten to swamp a wide area.
A boy has upturned his bike on the side of the road to deal with a fouled chain. Girls in pigtails cross the sandy pavement without looking either way. Traffic is light. A grey-white donkey trots along ahead of a flat cart carrying no goods.
The industrial area is deserted: nothing is being produced for domestic use or export. Petrol pumps that used to fuel lorries carrying goods are abandoned. No raw materials, cement or equipment are coming in.
Manufacturers and contractors who employ 300,000 people are closing down. The UN says 1.1 million out of Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants depend on rations of rice, flour, pulses and oil; if the 300,000 still working become jobless, they and their families will be put on rations.
Clouds of flies hover over a vast pile of rubbish at the entrance to the city. The municipality has not paid its workers for eight months. We wend our way through narrow streets, passing garages, shops stacked with tinned goods, stalls selling shrivelled fruit and vegetables, barrows offering cut watermelons. But there are few shoppers. Gazans have little money.
We skirt the municipal park, grass mown, red and gold lillies and flame-of-the-forest trees in flower, a tidy contrast to the mean streets. Near the Rashad Shawwa Cultural Centre a pair of trees hold up feathery branches covered in brilliant yellow blossoms.
Lights do not function. Each quarter gets eight hours of electricity a day. All but a few of the Strip's policemen are sitting at home on the orders of the emergency government in Ramallah on the West Bank so Hamas deploys youths in irridescent vests to direct traffic. Gunmen are no longer seen on the streets.
Salah gets out in front of the blue iron gate of his home. I ride on to Marna House hotel where the regular water pipe smokers, oblivious of the death of an Israeli soldier in a clash with militants, are puffing away in the shade of red and yellow umbrellas in the lush garden.