The highlights of most people’s trips to Palestine are not the places they visit or our incredible partners — it’s the people they meet, the hospitality they experience and the chance to hear everyday stories of life under occupation.

Of course, these trips only ever experience a small part of Palestine — they never get to visit Gaza and its 2 million occupants. We would love to take people there but this is impossible. Access of any sort is getting harder and harder and it still remains incredibly difficult for Gazans to get permission to get out. As the isolation grows, so the normal stories of everyday life fade, coverage is only given to the newsworthy and to the dreadful.

So for the next 18 months, our Palestine campaign will be ‘Ahlan Gaza’. It will follow the simple stories of people living in Gaza, people trying to live with dignity as their options close in on them each year.

The consequence is that in our heads we picture Gaza as a 25-mile long and 7-mile wide prison camp, full of people living in the most appalling conditions. And while this is true, it is a fraction of the story and fails to capture the dignity in the ordinary struggles of everyday life.

So for the next 18 months, our Palestine campaign will be ‘Ahlan Gaza’. It will follow the simple stories of people living in Gaza, people trying to live with dignity as their options close in on them each year. How do you encourage children to be hopeful for their future when unemployment is at 59%? How do you feed your family when 70% of the population is on food aid? How do you run a business on 5 hours of electricity a day?

We will still be calling for an end to the blockade and for full equal rights and we will still run our Women 4 Women campaign for Al Ahli hospital and secure funds to meet the psychosocial needs of traumatised young people. But our focus will be to tell the stories of life in Gaza that are going on every day, every week — outside the spotlight of a crisis-driven news-cycle.

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Please watch and share our short film about Gaza — ‘Open The Borders’.