What's life like inside the world's biggest prison?
To find out, you don't have to commit any crime - you just have to be born in Gaza.
This tiny strip of flat, open Palestinian land,
about 25 miles long and only 7 miles wide at its widest point,
is surrounded by Egypt and the Mediterannean Sea to the south and west,
and Israel, which has closed Gaza off to the outside world since the early ‘90s.
Like many prisons, Gaza is overcrowded.
In 2021, the population grew to over 2 million,
with one of the highest population densities in the world:
triple that of Detroit, which is about the same size.
But where did all these people come from?
Well, about 70% of Gazans are refugees and their descendants.
They were forced to move there when Israel took over their towns and villages
around the time it was founded in 1948.
Many fled thinking they were temporarily getting to safety.
But Israel has never allowed them to go back,
despite many of these towns and villages being a short drive or walking distance from Gaza.
Israel actually went on to occupy Gaza in 1967, impose military rule on the people who lived there
and gave part of its territory to Israeli settlers.
In the early '90s it imposed a closure policy on Gaza:
Palestinians there could no longer leave without a time-restricted, hard-to-get permit.
And Palestinians from other areas were restricted from visiting Gaza as well.
But it was in in 2006 when things got really bad.
Israel had pulled its soldiers and settlers out of Gaza the year before,
while still controlling the borders, the air space and the economy.
The Palestinian group Hamas, which has a military wing that fights the Israeli occupation,
won Palestinian elections and took over Gaza.
In response, Israel took its policies to the next level.
The only power plant was bombed.
Travel was banned.
Most imports and exports were blocked - forcing most of Gaza's factories to shut down.
Fishermen couldn't fish beyond a very limited area.
Supplies of fuel and electricity were reduced so
much that people converted their cars to run on cooking oil.
Even medical supplies were restricted.
The Israeli government decided how much food would be let in by calculating
how many calories everyone in Gaza would get.
As a government advisor at the time said,
"The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not make them die of hunger".
These policies crushed Gaza's economy.
It now has the highest unemployment rate in the world,
and more than half the people live under the poverty line.
Even materials to build infrastructure like sewage treatment plants have been held back,
so raw sewage is pumped into the sea.
In 2012, the United Nations said that if things didn’t get better, Gaza would be unlivable by 2020.
Instead, things got even worse.
There have been several major military assaults by Israel on Gaza.
Israel says the goal of these assaults is to limit Hamas’ ability to fight.
Thousands of civilians have been killed, and tens of thousands of homes destroyed in these assaults.
Israeli officials call it, “mowing the lawn.”
But even when the assaults stop,
supplies to rebuild are often prevented by Israel from entering the territory.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian government is a close ally of the Israeli government
and has long helped maintain the siege.
Its border with Gaza has often been closed as well.
When the border does open, only a few hundred people are allowed in or out.
For a while, Gazans built a tunnel economy under that border,
smuggling in everything from urgently needed supplies
to weapons to even fast food from Egypt.
But the Egyptian government eventually flooded many of the tunnels
and even destroyed one of its own border towns to cut off these supplies.
About half of Gaza’s population are children,
meaning they’ve only ever known life under this blockade.
They’ve never known a full day with electricity.
They know when the bombing starts, there’s nowhere for them to flee.
They know that when they get older, they’re probably not going to find work.
They likely will not be able to leave Gaza
or even meet Palestinians from other parts of their country.
They know what it’s like living in the world’s biggest prison.