I'm staying on in Gaza with Code Pink, the feminist antiwar group, which is leading a delegation of 66 activists from 18 states and 10 nations. The formidable Medea Benjamin is here (in pink), and so is Norman Finkelstein, and we have met with countless Palestinians, everyone from children at an orphanage to a Hamas spokesman and minister. The unending theme is humiliation, the way that the Israeli occupation has utterly stripped the population here of its dignity.
Much of this damage is social. Families broken by endless and arbitrary imprisonment of the fathers by the Israelis. The growing use of barbiturates to deaden the insults of hard living. Imprisonment and the loss of the ability to travel are of course the most obvious humiliations. But one other intimate example, before I go to bed. 
At the right is Mohammed Ali Omar, who runs a rehabilitation center in Gaza City (he's alongside Carolyn, a delegate from Maine). He says that his group has conducted more research than any other rehab outfit in the Middle East on the sexual rehabilitation of people who suffer spinal injuries.
"The people here do not love to talk about [sexuality] in the open," he told us, so the research is done quietly. But the aim is to help those who have been paralyzed to have a "functional" sexual life, if not a "normal" one, so as to sustain the family.
The National Center for Community Rehabilitation has 170 cases of spinal-cord injury, and 120 of them were created by Israeli aggression, Omar said.
