For Fun. Palestinian women and children waiting at the Erez border crossing. For sport. Basketball players from the Dehishe refugee camp , near Bethlehem, played their game against their Italian opponents, but the football team was still in Palestine. The eight members of the seven-a-side football team live in Gaza City, where they are all students at the Al Aqsa university. Despite an agreement with Israeli authorities allowing them to travel, when they arrived at the Erez border crossing, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, on the Israel border, they were stopped and sent back. The Milanese students who were due to play against them made a banner saying “Al Aqsa is my team”. Allowing young Palestinians to take a break from their dramatic everyday existence so they can discover how their counterparts in Italy live is a complex business, but it also represents a unique occasion for many, particularly for those from the Gaza Strip. In previous years the young Palestinian sportswomen had difficulty leaving the occupied territories, but this year the situation seems to perfectly reflect what is happening in the Palestinian territories where since last June Cisjordan enjoys a privileged status while the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, is officially an enemy state. Jalla’s Luca Colombo explained: “The organisers of the tour are trying to put pressure on the Italian authorities to petition the Israeli authorities in the hope that the girls can at least leave by 9 November in time for the next few matches”. The protest has reached Rome, where the foreign minister, D’Alema, and his deputy, Sentinelli, have promised to lend a hand, but the fact that the girls have been stopped from leaving the country despite a previous agreement doesn’t leave much hope. The border crossing was closed on 28 October for security reasons, which for the Israelis have precedence over everything else.

For healing. he Eretz border crossing. For medical help. Eretz is closed, but it isn’t only the girl’s who are waiting to cross. In recent days 16 seriously ill people, with heart problems, tumours and other illnesses needing urgent medical attention, have been refused entrance into Israel even though they had official permission to travel to healthcare structures in Cisjordan and Israel. The Israeli Physicians for Human Rights organisation has begun a campaign to re-open the border crossing and set up of an inquiry to discover how and why access was denied to two people in a serious condition who subsequently died. On 22 October Nimir Huhaiber, aged 77, was given permission to seek treatment for his heart condition in Israel, but when he first attempted to go to Eretz he was forced to turn back when Israeli soldiers opened fire on the ambulance transporting him. The following day, after he had been given assurances that he would be able to cross the border, Nimr returned to Eretz in another ambulance where, after a three-hour wait, he was forced to return to the hospital in Gaza for more oxygen. During the two-hour return journey Nimr was left lying by the roadside at the border in the sun, at which point the soldiers then told him that he couldn’t enter the country and sent him back. Nimr died a few hours after returning to Gaza. The second victim was a 23-year-old man, Mahmoud Taha, who was due to receive treatment for intestinal cancer at the Tel Hashomer hospital in Israel. After receiving permission to leave the Strip, Taher went to Eretz with his father, but the soldiers arrested his father and sent Taher back to Khan Younis on his own. With the help of Physicians For Human Rights, Taher obtained a new transit permit for 28 October, but when he arrived at Eretz he was forced to wait for eight hours before being allowed to enter Israel. Unfortunately the wait proved to be fatal since Taher died on the road taking him to the hospital.