work days as cheap labour for the Israeli factories the other side of the border, but their passes were for twenty-four hours only and did not allow travel beyond the place of work.To be caught outside Gaza without a proper permit meant imprisonment, often for many years.
Abed lived with his mother in a breezeblock terraced hut with dirt floors in all but the main room, which was concrete. This was also the only room with electricity, when it was available. They had their own running-water supply - a tap in the unroofed entrance - and since the Israelis blew up the sewage works at the beginning of the current intifada, the toilet was a bucket behind a curtain at the end of the hallway which was emptied into a large hole in the ground in a derelict house near no-man’s-land fifty yards away. Despite the conditions they were well-off compared to most others in the camps. The average income of a refugee family was ten US dollars a month. There was little industry left in Gaza, certainly nowhere near enough to provide work for those who were able. The population was more than a million, half of which was under fifteen years old, and a meagre living was scraped any way one could.
Abed was eleven years old when it occurred to him that his mother regularly received money although she never worked, but it was not until his teens that he asked her where it came from. He loved and revered his mother who had always cherished and cared for her only child, her one reason for living in this vile jail, something she often said to him after kissing his forehead each night before he went to sleep. The day he asked about the money she sat him down and explained how she came by it, also revealing for the first time the truth behind another great mystery of his life: his father. Her story was disappointingly brief for one of such importance, sketchily describing how Abed’s father had escaped the country by fishing boat to Cyprus soon after Abed was born, and from there how he made his way to England where he settled to live and work. The plan behind the escape was that one day Abed and his mother would follow him and they would all be together again, away from the poverty and humility of the camps. However, his father had failed to get the necessary paperwork and visas, or perhaps the Israelis had refused to recognise them; Abed’s mother was never clear about these kinds of facts and did not seem particularly interested in the smaller details. As far as she was concerned, they were trapped in Gaza, his father was in England, and that was that.
Like most of the older generation in the camps, she had grown to accept her way of life and had long since given up the dream of one day being free to live like those in other countries, in a proper house with utilities, a garden and the freedom to go where she wanted. The camp was over fifty years old, established in 1948, when the first people were forced out of their homes from towns and villages all over Palestine and herded like cattle into dozens of camps in Gaza and the West Bank, to live in crowded tents without proper medical facilities, food or sanitation. In time, they started up basic industries, made bricks and built small huts; these were closely packed together as their numbers grew, and only temporary abodes for they all hoped and believed that one day they would return to the farms and land they had owned for hundreds of generations. Her dreams, like those of most others, had withered with time. She had been born in Rafah camp, in an old British army tent barely a hundred yards from the hut she now lived in and where she knew she would die.Whatever the reasons for Abed’s father’s failure to get them out, the fact was they could not leave to join him, and he could not return without having to remain in Gaza for the rest of his life. He had chosen to stay in England where he could earn enough money to send them some each month so that they could live more comfortably than most.
The money arrived in his mother’s bank account promptly until Abed was twenty years old, then shortly after his birthday it stopped. His mother was