SITTING cross-legged on the canvas floor of the giant United Nations tent, six-year-old Ghadir rushes to put the finishing touches to her drawing.

It’s a colourful piece featuring a house by a stream with a little girl on the path amid a field of flowers and in the distance a rainbow.

“She is me,” Ghadir says beaming as she stands in the stifling makeshift classroom and points to the image of the girl on the path to her classmates sitting in a circle before her.

Sadly the reality for the artist and most of the other children and families living in Beit Hanoun on the northern frontier of Gaza strip, life is nothing as colourful.

It is a year this week since the homes and lives of Beit Hanoun families were levelled in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that to this day sees more than 100,000 people in Gaza still displaced with no real homes or livelihood and many living in the rubble created during the intense seven-week war.

This month also marks the 10-year anniversary of the withdrawal of Israelis from Gaza; both actions were supposed to bring positive change for those living on the embattled slither of land but today leaves them living in something akin to a giant open-air prison by the sea.

It’s as difficult to get in as it is to get out and News Corp Australia had to appeal to both the Israeli military and the Hamas to be allowed to travel and see first-hand the plight of Gaza locals in this politically sensitive anniversary month.

What we found was a land and people, psychologically and physically scarred by war and crying from despair for all sides to end their misery for the sake of their children.

“We asked the children today to dream draw, that is to draw what they dream,” says Save the Children’s field officer Khalde Hammami as she stands in the back of the “activities tent” in Beit Hanoun, where 36-degree temperatures outside add another 10 inside. It is stifling to the point of unbearable but some of the 120 children at the “safe site” are inside taking part in activities designed to distract their young minds.

“We do these activities to take away negative thoughts from these children, some of whom have seen three wars in six years and are psychologically affected,” Hammami said.

Indeed other drawings pinned to the side of the tent and drawn only in grey lead pencil point to that affect and feature aircraft dropping bombs and shadows on the ground that appear to be people with a large black eye crying scrawls of rain over all.

“Yes it is profound, can you imagine a child coming up with that thought?” Hammami said. “This is what we see and have to deal with.”

On July 8 last year Israel launched Operation Protective Edge to weed out Hamas military sites that for days had been firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel. The retaliatory strike on Gaza began with rockets from air and sea then a land invasion.

By August 26, the United Nations estimated 2104 people had been killed including 1462 Gaza civilians, 500 of them children; about 11,000 injured including 3370 children; with at least 15,000 homes destroyed and 100,000 people displaced.

One year on the devastation is still starkly clear.

Thousands are living in homes built into the rubble of what were houses with horse blankets strung up as walls and doors and bedrooms built from old canvas billboard posters and hoardings. In summer there is no escaping the heat, in winter it is the bitter cold and the rain runs. Others live in old sea containers or tents or heavily shelled apartment blocks that appear to be on the verge of collapse or in stables with the donkeys they use instead of cars.

Some survived the bombing but have since succumbed to the psychological fallout.

Eleven-year-old Jawahra or Jewel as she likes to be known shifts uncomfortably as her mother Susan Zaid details her daughter’s past six years.

She was three or four in the 2008 war in Gaza and her bed wetting didn’t stop by 2012 and the second conflict erupted. Then the third last year.

“Thanks to God our house was not hit by our enemies, we did not lose any life of family members but psychologically our experience was really devastating,” Susan begins as she goes on to detail how they had to flee their Berit Lahia home to a UN camp at the outbreak last year.

“We have four children, two girls and two boys, and this one not speaking about it but I could feel it and see it in her eyes, in her actions because she was afraid to do certain things and the bed wetting.

“My boy (Ahmad) who is 14 is really afraid since second war not able to go to toilet by himself and wanted to sleep with me and my husband and the youngest (Nada) six years old and all the time she clings to me and is afraid you know from the dark and to sleep alone by any means.

“I feel very sad and makes me very distressed.”

Jewel only brightens when she talks about the future.

“I want to be a doctor because I want to treat people,” she says. “I don’t have a speciality in my mind now but when I’m older I will decide. I just like helping people.”

According to a recent report, an average 75 per cent of children in Gaza surveyed experienced unusual bed wetting, 89 per cent of parents said their children suffer constant fear with seven out of 10 children suffering regular nightmares amid fears of another war.

Ibtihal Aloul, who is taking up a post in Gaza with the United Nations, said it was sad that most children could tell the difference now between a drone and an F16 or a mortar shell and a missile.

“While there is a blockade nothing will change, they cannot get enough materials in to rebuild and this could be like this for years,” she said.

Save the Children’s Gaza operations senior manager Ramzi Artin pauses for while when asked to sum up in a sentence the plight of Gaza locals today.

“I don’t want to say the word but mentally we are not healthy 100 per cent,” Ramzi, who has worked for the charity group since 1989 and lived in Gaza most of his life said haltingly.

“I think passing through three wars in less than six years I don’t believe anyone in Gaza is true healthy person I don’t want to say sick but mentally ... we are not … it’s just not easy, not easy.”

The Kafarna family had a two-storey home once and now lived in its shell as they await reconstruction they believe will never come.

They only lived because their son Ahmad 12 was hit by shrapnel from a tank shell and they rushed at dawn from their home to the hospital and when they returned they saw their house had been demolished.

“Yes it’s terrible our situation, how can we live like this in this extreme heat and in a few months it will be a terrible cold, I don’t know how we can go on,” mother Alia said.

Norwegian Refugee Council Palestine advocacy co-ordinator Mathew Truscott said the mental suffering of children was particularly disturbing since some were studying in schools which were supposed to be off-limit havens during the 2014 offensive but instead became targets, with Israeli military accusing Hamas of using them and mosques as shields for the rockets. This forces children to relive their fears everyday.

Of Gaza’s 1.8 million population, an incredible 43 per cent are children 14 years or younger and 20 per cent aged 15-24. Not surprising them that of the 30 per cent 25-54 year olds a whopping 60 per cent are unemployed.

Gaza is slowly dying, a partial land, sea and air blockade as stifling to movement as the heat in the city and all the children want is a roof over their heads and a future at the end of a colour rainbow.