Notes from the Field: Return to the Ruin that is Gaza

This personal account of the author’s November 2006 visit to Gaza, which coincided with Israel’s launch of its “Operation Autumn Clouds,” examines the impact on the Strip of economic and military siege, which intensified following Hamas’s victory in the January 2006 parliamentary elections. The author also addresses post-election changes in Gaza, both politically (especially the rise of open conflict between factions) and socially. She concludes by examining Gaza’s grim and uncertain future in the wake of the intense devastation—economic, political, and social—wreaked over the past several years.

JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN is associate director of the Middle Eastern studies program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.