Young people from Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem share their reality and hopes in one gathering

Youth from Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem presented their social priorities and the Palestinian common ground that gathers them despite the political division and the separation policies the occupation practises. The participants spoke of their reality and their hopes in a radio dialogue under the title: “In Palestinian: our future is one”, broadcast on Monday jointly on the Voice of the People radio in Gaza and Raya FM in Ramallah, within the project of strengthening civil-work organisations in achieving communal unity at the national level, in cooperation with Pal-Think for Strategic Studies and the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies at Birzeit University.

The participants — Hatem Abu Taha from Rafah, Salim al-Hindi from Gaza, Nuha Abu Salah from Jerusalem, Bahaa Farroukh from Hebron, and Amna Khandaqji from Nablus — expressed their hope for the exchange of visits between the homeland's cities, affirming that they have friendships and continuous communication with their peers in all the Palestinian cities, and their preoccupation with shared hopes and the challenges of a reality very close together despite its difference in details.

The activist Nuha Salah reviewed the pictures of the suffering to which the Jerusalemites are subjected — taxes, policies of limiting movement, and the surveillance of their travels — while Bahaa Farroukh and Amna Khandaqji each spoke of the effect of the Israeli checkpoints on their lives; in return, Hatem Abu Taha and Salim al-Hindi highlighted the concerns of Gaza's youth. The programme comes within four episodes taking up the effect of the division and the measures of geographic separation on communication between the youth of Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem: a first episode targeted the youth; the second reviews the commercial and industrial reality and the barriers to communication between the homeland's governorates; the third episode takes up the academic situations and the prevention of the exchange of visits between academics and the limiting of the Strip's students' enrolment in the West Bank's universities and vice versa; and the fourth episode takes up communication between women in the various governorates, presenting the difference and the common ground in the interests of Palestinian women — during the current month of February, every Monday at two o'clock on the Voice of the People radio (106 FM) and at six o'clock over the airwaves of Raya FM (98.3 FM).