Palestinian Abu Raed al-Athamna walks near his new house in the destroyed district of Ezbet Abed Rabbo in the northern Gaza Strip town of Jabaliya. (Wissam Nassar, Maan Images)

The prematurely ageing apartment block on the edge of Jabalya overlooks a forbidding stretch of wasteland. There is a lift shaft but no lift.

But if this is no surprise in a Gaza starved of building materials and spare parts, the interior of the spotless and stylishly furnished fourth-floor flat, where Maha El-Daya lives and works, certainly is. The walls are covered with her own (and her artist husband's) paintings: haunting land and seascapes, a portrait of a child; the living room table on which coffee is served is covered with a dark red and black cloth she hand-stitched in the pattern of a chess board, the chairs scattered with cushions decorated with her own kaleidoscopic embroidery.

Ms El-Daya's studio and home in the northern neighbourhood of al Saftawi betrays little sign of the turbulence and bloodshed of the three-week Israeli military onslaught on Gaza which began a year ago tomorrow. Nor does the painting she chose for the annual auction of Palestinian art organised this month in Jerusalem by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which sold for $900.

At first sight, it is an abstract against a vibrant blue background but, examined more closely, it is pregnant with traditional Palestinian motifs: the feathers seamstresses attach to a needle and thread instead of a knot; the bag containing Koranic verses once worn by women, the grain used in baking bread. The blue is the colour of the Mediterranean; the brown that of the desert land it laps against.

Ms El-Daya, 33, is one of a growing, younger generation of talented painters helping to bring Gaza - and indeed Palestinian - art to the well deserved attention of a wider public. If Gaza's economy has ground to a standstill, its modern art appears to be flourishing. And remarkably, the majority of the richly varied works on display in the "Colours of Hope" exhibition at the Alhambra Palace this month make little or no overt reference to last winter's war.

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In the case of Ms El -Daya, who has a daughter Salma, six, and a three-year-old son, Adam, this isn't because she was unaffected by the war; quite the opposite. "I couldn't draw anything," she says. "I was living in a depression during and after the war. I was very afraid and very worried by the bombardment and the Israelis came very near to us."

Her husband Ayman was stranded in Egypt, where he is studying for a Master's degree in fine arts. The trade union headquarters near her flat was bombed. Twenty-two members of the extended El-Daya family were killed when an Israeli F16 fighter bombarded their four-storey family apartment block in one of the worst incidents of the war - later explained by the military as an "operational error". Practical as well as multiply creative, and mindful that a prominent Hamas figure and potential target, Ismail Radwan, lives in her neighbourhood, Ms El-Daya painstakingly removed the glass from her windows on the first day of the bombing, replacing them as soon as the war was over. She says she could see the white phosphorus used in the bombing of nearby Atatra, adding "We saw the ball of fire, like an octopus". But though her words testify to her painter's eye, she had no inclination to commit it to canvas, seeing such immediate events as unsuitable for the lengthy task of constructing a work of art.

To read the full article please visit The Independent.