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Palestine Marathon West Bank Bethlehem REUTERS/Ammar Awad

Every year, runners weave between Palestinians and Israelis during the Palestine Marathon.
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I never intended to run a marathon, but when I realized that I would be on hand for the 2019 Palestine Marathon, I registered. I did so in solidarity with the goals of the aptly named Right to Movement, the global running community founded in 2013 to organize the first annual marathon there.

The irony was not lost on me, however: in training for a marathon meant to highlight the right to freedom of movement, I would utilize my privilege as a foreigner to access land that Palestinians themselves could not enter.

I trained in the West Bank, dotted with Israeli settlements, checkpoints, and military bases; in the Gaza Strip, the Mediterranean coastal enclave under Israeli blockade since 2007; in the northern Israeli city of Haifa; and in Jerusalem, the western part of which has been part of Israel since 1948 and the eastern part of which Israel occupied in 1967.

While I realized that there would be challenges during my training runs, what I hadn't anticipated was the window they would provide into the lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

February 14th: 15-mile training run, northern West Bank

REUTERS/Ammar Awad

I stretch my hamstrings just after dawn on the Dawabsheh family's restored porch in the village of Duma, facing the scorched remains of their neighbors' home. I met Eman, Ma'amoun, and their five sons in July 2015 after an Israeli settler had firebombed their home, as well as that of those neighbors (and distant cousins) Sa'ad and Riham Dawabsheh.

Eman's family had not been at home at the time. Sa'ad, Riham, and their children were not so lucky. Four-year-old Ahmad was rescued from the blaze and, despite severe burns, survived. Although Riham and Sa'ad were also pulled from the inferno, they succumbed to their injuries. Eighteen-month-old Ali's tiny charred corpse was found in the ruins of the house after the flames were extinguished.

I begin a slow warm-up jog through the village, imagining baby Ali's first steps on wobbly toddler legs. I run past Ma'amoun's goat sheds and cross through olive groves until I reach the main road and head south. I see signs for Shiloh and Shvut Rahel — Israeli settlements deep in the West Bank — and pass armed hitchhiking youths wearing knitted skullcaps.

Narrow, sun-bleached side roads wend around terraced rocky hills and into neighboring villages. On one such road, Israeli army vehicles drive past as teenage soldiers stare at me from the back of an open jeep, assault weapons in their laps. Soon, I reach the entrance to an Israeli military base and promptly turn around before anyone questions me.

The air grows warm, but I have more mileage to pound out, so I start up a rocky path and soon find myself on the outskirts of another village. Pulling out my phone to see where I am, I'm startled and check again. I hadn't realized that Mughayyir was this close to Duma. I had been in Mughayyir only a week earlier with the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem.

Residents of the village had walked us through a recent attack by Israeli settlers from the nearby outpost of Adei Ad. The farmers were working their land here — one man indicated the slope behind him as thick fog rolled in. The armed settlers came from that outpost — he pointed to a nearby hill — and began attacking the villagers. A Palestinian flag fluttered under an overcast sky, marking the spot where 38-year-old Hamdi Na'asan had been shot and killed.

I jog back toward Duma thinking of the photo I had seen of Na'asan holding his four children. It's not until I pass more armed youth wearing yarmulkes that the realization hits me. The settlers who killed Hamdi Na'asan came from the outpost of Adei Ad. The settler who burned Ali Dawabsheh to death had also lived in Adei Ad.

A goat herder waves to me from a terraced hill as I near the entrance to Duma. It's Ma'amoun Dawabsheh.

February 22nd: 16-mile training run, the Gaza Strip

(AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

I head toward Gaza City's seaport. The sun hasn't crested. The air is crisp and cool. I run south alongside the waves, relieved that their rhythmic pulse drowns out the Israeli drones overhead. Their incessant buzzing always puts me on edge.

One dawn in 2004, armed drones killed two militants outside the building where I was staying. Children scooped up scraps of the men's scalps on small sticks, presenting them for me to film.

I jog past youths maneuvering gracefully on paddleboards and young men pushing old wooden skiffs out to sea. An elderly woman is collecting something from the sand, whether shells or bait I can't tell. Four miles into the run, I spot a pipe embedded in the side of a high sandy bluff discharging a stream of water too wide for me to cross. I scan the cliff, eager to reach the coastal road above it and notice a dilapidated cement staircase. I can't imagine where it leads, but it goes up. I jog up the stairs and find myself in the ruined remnants of a building, most likely shelled by Israeli gunships during the 2014 war.

I run through those ruins to a surrounding wall and locked gate, climb the wall, leap to the sidewalk, and continue jogging. Only then do I wonder: Did anyone see me? A foreign woman appearing out of nowhere, dropping from a wall surrounding a destroyed building, and running away is anything but inconspicuous. I half expect armed men to pull up on a motorcycle and begin questioning me, but the road, to my relief, remains deserted.

I return to the beach and jog on it until I reach Wadi Gaza, a wetland rich in biological diversity that was declared a nature reserve in 2000. When I first visited this valley in 2012, however, the fresh water that once flowed into the sea here had already been replaced by human waste from nearby refugee camps. I returned in 2015 to find that a small sewage treatment plant had been built but was not yet operational.

For 18 months, Israel had delayed the arrival of the aerators that mix oxygen into the waste water. They were finally allowed into blockaded Gaza later that year. The plant then operated until 2017 when, thanks to the Strip's ongoing electricity shortages, it stopped. The river of untreated sewage I now confront is only a small part of the nearly four million cubic feet of excrement that are estimated to spew daily into the sea from the Strip.

I run to the coastal road bridge, jogging past the plant's large pool now brimming with waste. I can't help but retch. I soon leave the stench behind me, aware that Wadi Gaza's residents deal with that odor — and the resulting health risks and mosquitoes — every day.

There are no sidewalks now. Curious boys on donkey-carts stare at me. At the halfway point of my training run, I return to the beach and turn around. Teenage boys drinking tea at a small campfire pause their animated conversation to cheer me on.

As Gaza's seaport reappears, hazy in the distance, two thundering explosions suddenly reverberate. I look around, but there's no one in sight to tell me what caused them. Shortly thereafter, I pass families enjoying the Gaza City promenade, toddlers riding tricycles, children playing soccer. Two women walk in my direction, fully covered (aside from their eyes) in black niqab. How will they regard a jogging, bare-headed foreign woman? I manage a "good morning" in Arabic as our paths cross. One of them claps, the other gives me a thumbs-up, and both call out, "Brava aleiki!" (Bravo to you!)

The explosions, I'm later told, were rockets that Hamas fighters had shot into the sea "for testing."

March 3rd: 10-mile training run, the Gaza Strip

REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma

I run north on the narrow sidewalk through Beach refugee camp in the emerging sunlight. The guards near Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh's house pay me no mind, but small children peer at me from the doorways of ramshackle cinderblock dwellings, their corrugated zinc roofs secured with chunks of concrete. Eighty-six thousand refugees live in Beach camp's one-third of a square mile, making it one of the most densely populated places in the world.

The steep cliff bordering the sea is strewn with car parts, broken appliances, jagged concrete blocks, and twisted rebar. A man and a teenager push a small skiff into the water to try their luck at a morning catch. Their luck is likely to be slim. After all, the Israeli navy permits fishing only up to six nautical miles off the coast, a restriction that limits the catch — and deepens Beach camp's already endemic poverty.

In 2015, I accompanied Majd, who is from Beach camp, on a nighttime fishing trip. Snagging sardines in his net under the stars, he told me about fishermen he knew who had been shot at sea. The danger continues: in 2018, the Israeli navy killed one fisherman, injured six others, and arrested 53.

Past the camp, I connect with a dirt road and push forward until I can see what looks like a boundary fence in the distance. Israeli soldiers often shoot Palestinians they deem to have come too close to the barrier, which Israel constructed between 1994 and 1996 in order to control the movement of people and goods in and out of the Gaza Strip.

Just the previous week, I saw someone shot by Israeli soldiers at a demonstration at another section of the barrier. I believe it was 14-year-old Yousef al-Dayah, who died from his wound, but I can't be sure. Not wanting to risk getting too close, I turn around and head back towards Gaza City.

The fishermen's shacks ahead look idyllic but as I approach, one dog, then many, begin to bark furiously. I retreat, but they chase me. Given the chronic shortages of medicine in Gaza, if a dog bites me, I wonder whether rabies shots would even be available. I halt and the snarling dogs surround me. "Go away," I command sternly and, to my amazement, they do.

I walk cautiously toward the main road and, as the dogs resume their sun-drenched poses, begin jogging again.

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