In Hope and Despair: Life in the Palestinian Refugee Camps

Description

Photographs by Mia Grondahl, foreword by Hanan Ashrawi and introduction by Peter Hansen (Amer Univ in Cairo Press; October 2003)

Sixty years after the imposition of the colonial state of Israel, more than five million Palestinian refugees are still waiting to return to their homes and lands. Most are today living under harsh conditions in overcrowded camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and nearby countries. It is a wait that has now been passed on to a fourth generation.

Between 1999 and 2002, Swedish photographer Mia Grondhal visited most of the camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, documenting through a remarkable series of intimate, direct and powerfully honest images the lives of a people making the best of a “temporary” existence that has lasted over half a century, a people whose lives have been put on hold but who still have not given up hope that one day they will return.