In the span of a few months in 1948, two hundred thousand refugees had poured into this narrow band of sand dunes and orange groves along the Mediterranean, more than tripling its population. Two thousand people per square mile were crowded onto a strip of land surrounded by Israel, Egypt, and the sea. All supplies had to travel three hundred miles through the Egyptian desert and cross Gaza's only border with the Arab world—the Sinai Peninsula, to the southwest. "It is therefore hardly surprising that conditions very rapidly deteriorated,"
Gaza
