Begun six days after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada and carried day-by-day over the Internet, this diary provides a unique perspective on how events were viewed and lived on the ground as they were happening. More particularly, it conveys a sense of life during these events in the Dahaysha refugee camp, a sprawling conglomerate of 10,000 inhabitants south of Bethlehem. The journal entries in their entirety can be found on http://xii.net/intifada2000/deardiary. The excerpts below were approved by the author.
Muna Hamzeh, a journalist, was born in Jerusalem and raised in Amman. With a journalism degree from the United States, she returned to Palestine in 1988 to cover the intifada and has lived in Dahaysha camp with her husband since 1990. She is cofounder of the Across Borders Project at Birzeit University, which aims to connect Palestinian refugee camps in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan via the Internet.