Dateline: July 12

In this week’s Dateline, SBS reporter Brett Mason travels to Gaza to see how everyday Palestinians are coping with the daily struggle of finding food.

What he discovers is a resilient group of locals with ingenious ways of adapting to their daily horrors.

With a crippling economy, Gaza now has the highest unemployment rate in the world at 43%. 57% of Gazans don’t know where their next meal will come from.

Reporter Brett Mason meets a farmer named Iyad. His family has farmed in Gaza for generations; but his land is now caught in the crossfire between Hamas and Israel. With his farm the deadly 300 metre no go zone separating Gaza and Israel, he’s been forced to find a new way to grow his lettuce. Iyad now uses aquaponics to farm soil-less crops.

Brett also meets a determined group who also haven’t given up – building Gaza’s own version of Silicon Valley.

With power shortages becoming an everyday occurrence in Gaza, Omar Badawi has invented a way to charge your phone anytime and anywhere, calling it the ‘walk and charge’.

“It is a small device. You can hold it and when you are walking you generate electricity that can help you to recharge your mobile… I think it will be the next revolutionary device in the world”, Omar tells Dateline.

However, despite the optimism from locals, the UN still claim that if more isn’t done to change Gaza will be uninhabitable by 2020.

“To think that in a few years’ time that will be no longer actually viable for humans to live with any kind of dignity, it’s actually quite heart wrenching”, says Melinda Young, the Deputy Director of UNRWA operations in Gaza.

Tuesday 12 July at 9.30pm on SBS.