Author Hervé Kempf is a journalist with Le Monde daily newspaper in Paris. He has authored several books including, most recently, La Guerre Secrète des OGM (The Secret War of Genetically Modified Foods. Seuil, 2003). Also by Hervé Kempf:

• La Révolution biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées (Albin Michel, 1998)
• La Baleine qui cache la forêt. Enquête sur les pièges de l'écologie (La Découverte, 1994)
• L'Économie à l'épreuve de l'écologie (Hatier, 1991)

Jérôme Equer is an award-winning international photographer and filmmaker. By Jérôme Equer:

• Traumas (Grandvaux, 2003)
• Les Murs de l'enfer (Albin Michel, 2001)

GAZA: Life in a Cage was originally published in French by Editions du Seuil, © 2005, as Gaza, La vie en cage, © 2004 Jérôme Equer for the photographs.

Their images and anecdotes reveal the deeply human side of a conflict whose impact on viewers has perhaps worn thin through endless but superficial media exposure. They made 4 fifteen-day visits to Gaza between January and November 2004. As they put it, "Day after day, Gaza had been in the news, but it never added up to anything more than a confused impression of violence and frenzy. The whole place seemed populated only by caricatures. It was just a place on a map, a name in the newspapers, the locus of some insoluble conflict."

Seeking the story beneath the sound bites, they steered clear of political analyses and meetings with prominent figures, but visited with individuals and families from Palestinian farmers to Israeli doctors, creating an informal survey of the views on all sides.

They paid their own way and chose their own angles and points of view. Perhaps, they thought, a more human and less institutional take on the complex and inflamed Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be useful. In exploring this subject, they were also exploring the nature of the violence that attended it. Peace, after all, can never be achieved solely on the basis of argumentation, of opposing lines of logic that each has its own legitimacy, but by stepping back, by getting a little bit of distance that would bring a human perspective to the real people who live behind the faces. They sought to get beyond the surface of appearances and, if not to understand, at least to actually get close to the essence of this story.

This report on the tragedy unfolding in the Gaza Strip addresses a simple question that most of us have overlooked: what on earth is it like to live day-by-day in a tiny territory, over-populated and beset by war? Based on several extended stays among Palestinians and Israeli settlers as well, this narrative and these photographs shine a new light on this 'open-air prison.' Through individual portraits and testimonies, the authors reveal a lively scene where everyone is struggling tenaciously to hold onto a semblance of normal life. Herve Kempf took notes; Jerome Equer took photographs. And the adventures they shared are now their gift to the reader.