B, my friend and neighbour in Gaza City, is a brilliant, ambitious young woman. After years of exile in Syria, in the mid-1990s B was able to obtain a permit and, eventually, an ID card that allowed her family to return to Gaza.
A 30-year-old civil engineer involved in some of Gaza's top projects, she was recently accepted to pursue her masters degree in Bir Zeit University. Several paid terms later she had to withdraw her standing because she was continuously denied a travel permit to the West Bank by the Israeli government, for "security reasons".
Now, B confesses, she feels that she has gone from living in a prison on the outside, unable to live in her homeland, to being in jail in her own home, unable to move, study or visit her sister in the West Bank.
B is not alone, of course. Nor does her story represent a particularly glaring example of the effects of Israeli border closures (her 45-year-old neighbour went blind waiting for his permit to be approved - one that would have allowed him to be treated in a Jerusalem hospital).
What it does demonstrate is how far-reaching and invasive the consequences can be, affecting even seemingly banal aspects of Palestinian life, rendering routine matters utterly impossible.
Today Gaza faces one of the most brutal military sieges in recent memory, with water and electricity cut off for most of the population and the borders hermetically sealed.
Which begs the question: what does a lot of red tape have to do with the current crisis?
Last August, Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip. The world rejoiced, rushing to declare that Gaza was now "free". So why are the Palestinians not satisfied? Why, almost a year on, would they capture an Israeli soldier and continue to fire homemade rockets into Israeli towns when they could have built a better life for themselves?
The reality is that Gaza has been under effective Israeli siege for over a decade now, subject to the merciless grip of a complex Israeli matrix of administrative control that seeps into and affects every aspect of our lives.
Only several months on from the disengagement, Gaza resembled little more than the largest, highest-security open-air prison on earth.
It soon became apparent - long before even Hamas was elected into power - that the Israeli occupation of Gaza had not ended. It had just become more sophisticated and entrenched: Gaza's skies and the Palestinian borders, air space, travel permit system, and birth registration process all remained under Israeli control.
The intoxicating sense of freedom we felt during the days after the last of the Israeli settlers departed dissipated nearly as quickly as it had descended upon us. Though internal barriers and checkpoints were lifted, there existed a larger, seemingly impermeable barrier surrounding every aspect of our lives.
Israel continued to impose a blanket travel ban to the West Bank and Jerusalem on over 90% of Palestinians in Gaza, particularly those between 16 and 35 years of age.
Even Palestinian control over the dreaded Rafah crossing - Gaza's only route to the outside world, turned out to be ultimately fictitious, with Israel effectively controlling who used the crossing (only Palestinian ID-card holders have so far been allowed in, and now the crossing is closed altogether).
Israel also continued its freeze issuing more than 50,000 Palestinian identification cards and family reunification permits , which would have allowed Palestinian couples to join their spouses and travel freely in and out of Gaza.
My husband, a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Lebanon's refugee camps after his family was forced out of Haifa in 1948, is still forbidden from visiting me and our son, Yousuf, when we are in Gaza, let alone returning to his native home.
Yassine, now a physician specialising in the US, is still without any citizenship or country to claim as his own, and is unable to live legally with his family in his own country
These and other restrictive Israeli policies were in place well before Hamas's election victory, and in fact may have contributed to it. They also help explain why Palestinians have not overwhelmingly demanded the release of the captured Israeli soldier, despite the consequences they have borne as a result.
Israel, and the outside world, it seemed, had had enough with Gaza. It was behind them now, a done deal; Israel had "withdrawn" and, in the end, that was all that mattered. What more did Palestinians want?
But the feeling among Palestinians was that Gaza had been left to the wolves. Never mind the lack of freedom, of sovereignty, of any semblance of statehood or territorial contiguity.
Gaza was for Palestinians to deal with now, no matter that almost ever aspect of it was still controlled by an outside force that no longer assumed responsibility for the welfare of the people whose land it still occupied.
Gaza had become hell on earth, its inhabitants surrounded from all sides, deprived of their most basic freedoms, completely bereft of their rights and their sovereignty and yet somehow expected to bow in submission and accept their fate.
There is, of course, another element to all this. We have been inundated with articles in the mainstream press about the fate of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit (though attention has shifted towards Lebanon at present), while the international community and mainstream press remains relatively silent in the face of Israel's illegal detention of Palestinians.
There are nearly 9,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails or detention centres. Most are being held without charges, under deplorable humanitarian conditions, including medical negligence, in unsanitary surroundings, subjected to routine beatings, position torture and strip searches. Many were kidnapped while in the safety of their own homes, and are detained in the absence of any law defining their status and rights.
The overwhelming majority of Palestinian prisoners are political captives who have been arbitrarily imprisoned or detained under the broad banner of "security", according to the Israeli human rights group B'tselem.
Also in Israeli jails, often imprisoned for charges such as "stone-throwing", or for no charges or due process at all, according to Defence for Children International, are 388 children.
Thousands of other minors have been detained and subjected to violence, position torture and brutal interrogation tactics in Israeli jails and detention centres over the course of the past six years. Often, they are abducted from the safety of their own homes or neighbourhoods.
If we were to count the total number of Palestinians detained or imprisoned since 1967, it would amount to 20% of the population, 40% if one were to count only men- the highest rate of incarceration in the world. That is the rough equivalent of more than 12 million Britons.
It is at all surprising, then, that a recent poll showed that a majority of Palestinians were in favour of demanding something in return for the Israeli captives?
What many people would perhaps find surprising, though, is that, as of late July 2006, 65% of Palestinians, in varying degrees, were in favour of resuming the peace negotiations with Israel, given the opportunity.
But the way Palestinians see it, instead of offering a hand, Israel has bombarded our cities, withheld our aid, and closed our borders, citing the lack of a negotiating partner on the Palestinian side, no matter who was in power.
In the end, the lesson to be taken when - if - this most recent "escalation" is over and done with is that the policy of unilateralism can never succeed in achieving a just and secure peace.
Israel's ongoing war against the Palestinians will not solve anything. It does not matter whether this is conducted through extrajudicial assassinations, grossly disproportionate artillery strikes against civilian populations in northern Gaza (in response to fewer than 400 homemade rockets fired into Israel since March, Israeli has launched more than 8,000 heavy-calibre artillery shells) or through the continued asphyxiation of the economy and the people through economic and political blockades and border closures, all of which predate the democratic election of the current, Hamas-run government. Israel's actions will only spur further retaliations, resulting in more bloodshed, the loss of more innocent civilian lives and the perpetuation of the conflict.
Only through fully ending Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza can a lasting peace be achieved.