Just an hour’s drive down the coast from the tourist trap of Tel Aviv is an 8-mile wide strip of polluted land in which two million people have been penned inside it for over a decade.

The journey to Gaza is a galling one: on one side of the separation barrier are sushi bars, malls, beaches and sweeping highways; on the other, dirt tracks snarl through shipwrecked neighbourhoods overseen by Israeli watchtowers. The roads end in a dirty slash of sea; that too is inaccessible.

Five years ago, the United Nations famously predicted that, if the humanitarian conditions didn’t change, Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020.

This warning has been recited ad nauseam as we approach that deadline.

But the truth is that Gaza has long been uninhabitable. Gaza is not a ticking time bomb – it is a slow-motion explosion.

Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient Show all 15 1 /15 Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-1.JPG Athar, 21, a beneficiary of Al Fakhoora, a programme of the Education Above All Foundation, was the youngest member to join the writers association, aged 14. She stressed the importance of explaining what is happening to the Palestinian people. Five years ago the conflict changed her life forever; “The house was full of our relatives, suddenly everything went dark. I tried to get out of the house, I felt a pain in my leg and there was so much blood. I lost consciousness and woke in the ambulance. Hospitals ran out of anesthetic so doctors stitched injuries I sustained without it, it was incredibly painful. I heard the news that my father was killed. Losing him was incredibly difficult for me as we were so close.” As a child, Athar had dreamt of becoming a writer or a poet; “My father was my inspiration, encouraging me to write, since his death I have struggled to write anything. For me education is like food or fuel, an energy that gives me power to keep going.” Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-8.JPG Kholoud, 20, lives in east Gaza near the border of Israel. A fourth year student at the Islamic University of Gaza who is supported by the Al Fakhoora. She explained how living in conflict is challenging, having to leave quickly if there is any escalation. This can lead to constant fear for the safety of your family and friends, and from an education perspective with delays to lecture and exam timetables. “In Gaza we have to be adaptable to our situation during difficult times.” Her dream for Gaza is peace on all sides, “If we have peace everything will follow. The real barrier to the success of our people is not conflict but the result of conflict, unemployment. The difference that the Al Fakhoora has made to the lucky ones enrolled into the programme is enormous; leadership courses, psycho social support and having dialogue with others.” Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-6.JPG Israa, 21, a beneficiary of the Al Fakhoora programme, is in her fourth year at the Azhar University studying primary education. Born and raised in Gaza City, she lives with her parents and her nine siblings. She explained, “Growing up in conflict, teaches us to be resilient and resistant, to deal with hardships. It allows us to be compassionate and help others, to empathise with them.” Her hopes and ambitions for the future are to become a good teacher and to study psychology to be able to help with the counselling of those traumatised by the war. “Peace is my dream for Gaza, peace is more than enough to dream about. If this ever happens then everything will be alright.” Israa explained how education was the bedrock to everything, “It enables me and gives me great strength and empowerment”. Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-5.JPG ‘A window to the world’ A view across the Mediterranean Sea, Eman, 21, looks out. Restriction to travel creates limitations on what you can achieve. However, it does not stop the appetite of the people of Gaza to want to emerge themselves in education. Gaza has a 96.8% literacy rate - among the highest in the world. Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-4.JPG Nadeen, 22, from Gaza City, lives with her mother and 4 siblings. The loss of her father through illness when she was young, has placed enormous financial pressures on the family. Nadeen works in the university medical laboratories, and volunteers in the blood bank, a vital service in a city of conflict like Gaza. She explains; “Conflict affects all aspects of life - less opportunity, greater levels of unemployment. Her message to the world is that education is the basis of everything, it is a weapon to fight all challenges in the world. It is a basic right. Children are our future, the next leaders of our world. They need to have the tools to lead and create the life for Palestine.” Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-2.JPG The familiar mangled remains of twisted steel and rubble in the city of Gaza. Here the result of an airstrike in 2009. The Beach Camp, set back from the sea, is one of five refugee camps here in the ‘strip’. Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-3.JPG Safah, 23, was born in Gaza city, and has lived all her life at Beach Camp Gaza. A graduate in basic education of Al Axa University, she is currently looking to improve her English language. She explained that it’s very difficult growing up in Gaza, and that there are already several barriers to education, not helped by the economic situation and the constant electricity cuts. Many students are forced to abandon their studies due to the lack of funds for books and transport. “Education has helped me to become a better person - and as a woman - her own identity. It allows a person to have a value in society. If Al Fakhoora and EAA weren’t there, she would still be Safe, the same person but her confidence would be completely different. Palestinian people will always rise up.” Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-7.JPG Gaza’s next generation, play football in the Beach Camp area of the city, through the window of a building shelled in the 2009 conflict. A reminder that no timeframe exists in Gaza, you can’t plan when living in conflict you just have to live in the moment. Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-9.JPG Naveen, 20, studying Criminal law at University Palestine, lives in the suburbs of Gaza with her three brothers and four sisters. She explained how education is life, it empowers her to be dependent on herself, so she and others can challenge difficulties. Growing up in conflict can make you feel sad but it does not limit what you can achieve as an individual. Her dream is to be allowed to travel outside of Gaza, see the world and graduate and become a great lawyer defending the rights of the Palestinian people. She said, “We deserve to live in peace, we need to see the world, to have the chance to live and to serve.” Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-10.JPG Mariam, 23, a graduate in English Literature from the Islamic University of Gaza explains, “Whether they do or not, Palestinians all believe they have a right. Having rights, gives people hope and the resilience to continue. We all believe that we will one day be victorious, claim our ancestral rights. If we die here, then we die here. If we live her, then we live here. One thing you can guarantee is that Palestinian people will not leave here alive.” Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-11.JPG Gazan youth forget their struggle for a moment and play football. Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-12.JPG Eman, 21, a graduate from the Islamic University in Business Administration lives in Khan Younis with her parents and six siblings. Her family house was destroyed during conflicts in 2005. They were homeless for a while and were forced into rental accommodation. She discussed how important education is for everyone and that it should be inclusive and protected, “The mindset needs to change, many families only believe in formal education, but there are also several other types of educational opportunities. Personally without education I would be nothing. Through education you can build yourself, enhance your character and personality.” Her message; “I want the world to know that we deserve every right, the same rights as everyone.” Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-13.JPG Lara, 10, lives in Shujaiya, a neighbourhood in the city of Gaza. Her family home was destroyed during the 2014 siege in the city. When the shelling intensified everyone fled their homes, leaving with just the clothes on their back, returning seven weeks later to rubble and ruin. She said her family returned and rebuilt their home, they were not upset, they said it is normal life in Gaza. Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-14.JPG Children swinging on the steel reinforcing rods from the first floor of a building shelled in the 2009 conflict. What some see as a stark reminder of what can happen at any time living in conflict, children see as a source of entertainment as they live out their younger years incarcerated with two million others in the 360km square thin ribbon of land on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA Women of Gaza: Empowered and resilient women-gaza-paddy-15.JPG ‘Last Light over Gaza’. As the sun sets on another day across the city, Athar, 21, and its residents pray that the sunrise will bring with it peace, prosperity and hope. Paddy Dowling Paddy Dowling/EAA

The enclave has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt since 2007, after Hamas – a militant group that has called for the end of Israel and regularly fires rockets indiscriminately at its civilians – swept to power. Over the last decade, Hamas’s armed wing, together with allied groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, have waged three wars with Israel, which the Israelis says justifies the continued blockade.

So synonymous has Gaza become with the misery created by the blockade that people forget there was a time where Israelis drove to lunch there, when Gazans commuted to Israel.

In other words, things have been bad for a while. But over the last year and a half, a new kind of emergency has unfurled.

Since March last year, thousands of Palestinians have marched towards Israel’s separation barrier demanding the right to return to their ancestral lands from which they were forced from or fled during the conflict which accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948.

The Israeli army has killed over 300 Gazans during these rallies and injured 35,000 others, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The Israelis, who are likely to be investigated by the International Criminal Court for these attacks, have defended themselves by saying those participating in rallies endanger Israelis lives by hurling explosive and incendiary devices over the separation barrier (kilometres of Israeli land has been burned by firebombs tied to balloons).

Yet either way, over 150 Palestinians have had limbs amputated; a further 200 are expected to over the next few years. Health officials say they do not have the $68m needed to treat the most severely wounded. Gaza has no specialist prosthetic limb centre.

The worst injured therefore need to travel outside of Gaza for treatment. Yet the percentage of medical travel-permits that Israel issues has dropped from 92% in 2012 to on average of just about 60% today, according to the WHO. At the start of the protests, only 18% of permits for those injured during them were granted – likely bumping up the number of amputations required.

The injuries sustained by Palestinians at the rallies have brought the strip’s health system to its knees. Every week more injured flood hospitals, forcing them to clear their wards, cancel scheduled operations (9,000 Gazans are awaiting elective surgeries) and use up their diminishing drug stores (currently Gazan hospitals lack 50 per cent of the essential drugs they need). While the rally organisers have this week said that they will scale back to monthly rallies, the damage has already been done.

This health crisis is compounded by the fact that hundreds of medical workers have fled the strip, while those who’ve stayed have had their salaries cut in half, as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have been unable to pay them in full.

The Gaza amputee football team that's a source of hope for players

Nor do Gaza’s medical woes stop at the border. This year, Gazan cancer patients have suffered their worst shortages of medicines, with 63% of the drugs they need unavailable. There is no radiation therapy machine in the enclave.

According to the latest studies by bodies such as the Palestinian Water Authority, the WHO and the NGO Ecopeace, just under 97 per cent of Gazan water is undrinkable, while Gaza’s only natural source of water – the aquifer – is so over-pumped that it is on the cusp of collapse.

Gaza has recently built three small desalination plants, but these are insufficient to provide clean water for the enclave. It is building bigger plants, but the projects are delayed amid shortages of power and spare parts permitted to enter Gaza, as well as the funds needed to complete the projects and then pay for it to operate.

A researcher for the Palestinian Water Authority stated that even if Gaza can produce more clean water, its pipe systems and storage tanks are so riddled with disease that people will still get dirty water.

There have been small improvements in the past year, such as to the strip’s notoriously intermittent electricity connection. Yet huge problems remain: Gaza’s sewage plants, for example, still do not function properly, leaving half the strip’s beaches so polluted that they are unfit for use. Youth unemployment has soared to 70 per cent, while a sorely under-investigated mental health crisis continues.

Miraculously, the strip staggers on, propped up by aid agencies; WHO officials have told me that the only thing stopping an epidemic in Gaza is down to it being one of the most vaccinated places on earth. Just a few cases of cholera, for example, and Gazans would fall like dominos.