A Palestinian girl holds a picture of a relative imprisoned in an Israeli jail during a demonstration in Gaza. (Wissam Nassar, Maan Images)

As a people, the Palestinians have lacked many things, but they have never been at a loss for words. The creation of Israel in 1948 was their nakba, or catastrophe, and generated their shatat, or diaspora. Israel's conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 was a niksa, or setback. But they have yet to coin a term for their present situation. It is, by any definition, a calamity, with the Palestinians physically divided by Israeli barriers, politically polarised between rival governments in Gaza and the West Bank that pursue radically opposed policies, and economically dependent on the world's charity.

Those are the broad outlines. The details are far worse. One day this week at Erez checkpoint, by the remotely operated hydraulic cattle-gate that is the last of six barriers through which a trickle of humanitarian traffic still passes between Israel and Gaza, a man was whimpering in pain. His sister explained that this was the third day in a row he had journeyed to this grim place, by costly taxi, then been carried by porters across the bomb-flattened wasteland that used to be the highway to Gaza, only to be barred from reaching a scheduled chemotherapy session in an Israeli hospital. They would try again the next day, and for his subsequent five monthly sessions.

Inside Gaza, the brief euphoria after last month's breach of the territory's other border, with Egypt, has dissipated. Israeli restrictions on trade, tightened since Hamas's takeover last June, have reduced living standards to subsistence level.

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Supplies of staple foods are adequate, but petrol, prescription drugs and construction materials grow increasingly scarce. Electricity is sporadic. Raw sewage overflows potholed roads. In retaliation for a rain of Palestinian rockets on Israel, which are seldom lethal but have displaced many residents of the Israeli town of Sderot, Israeli missile strikes and raids continue to kill around a dozen Gazans a week. Most victims are armed men, but some are civilians such as the three children killed in the past week alone. "This is a prison where even the jailers are tortured," grumbles an officer in the Hamas-run police.

While not so dire, the situation in the West Bank is hardly enviable. Despite international pleas for a freeze on Jewish settlement, Israeli infrastructure has already placed some 40% of the territory out of bounds to its 2.4m Palestinian residents, according to the UN. A lacework of roads built for the use of 450,000 settlers, whose number has grown by 5.5% a year since the signing in 1993 of the peace-seeking Oslo accords, confines Palestinians inside isolated enclaves that are controlled by checkpoints subject to sudden closure. Since the killing of an Israeli woman in a suicide bombing in Dimona on February 4th, the first such attack for many months, some 270,000 Palestinian males aged between 16 and 65 have been blocked from leaving the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm and Qalqilya. A third of West Bank residents now rely on UN food aid.

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