Laila El-Haddad takes us into the intense life and world of a busy Palestinian journalist who is both covering the story of Gaza and living it, with her young son. She was in Gaza City in 2005, watching hopefully as the Israelis prepared their withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. She covered the January 2006 Palestinian elections—judged ‘free and fair’ by international monitors. But then, she watched aghast as the Israeli government, backed by the Bush administration, moved in to punish Gaza’s 1.5 million people for the way they had voted by throwing a tough siege around the Strip.

The Abridged Edition of this earlier work focuses on El-Haddad's writings from within Gaza and on the angst she felt in late 2008, when she worried deeply about the fate of her parents and other relatives trapped inside Gaza during a fierce Israeli attack.