In the middle of Khan Yunis, opposite the vegetable stands in the municipal market, four youngsters aged 12 to 14 sat on the curbstone of the wet road. Beneath them, the sewage flowed freely, dirtying their toes, which stuck out of torn sandals and the hems of their ragged sweatpants. Their conversation focused on a single topic.

Ibrahim boasted of his advantage over his three friends: He had participated in nearly every funeral held in the city. He missed three of them because of quarrels with his older brother, but he vowed fervently not to miss the next one, even if his brother breaks his leg.

Salah regarded him scornfully and arrogantly informed his buddies that he himself goes to all the funerals, even those far from where he lives, and after they are over, he makes a point of meeting relatives of the shahids (martyrs) who have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces, embracing them and shaking their hands. For this, he hopes, the shahids will requite him when the day comes by helping him obtain a good place near them in paradise.

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Attia, the third, is convinced that despite his two friends' boasting, they will not achieve the same status that he will when he dies. He is certain that a great many people will come to his funeral, because he has seen to it in advance: Not only has he attended the funerals of all the shahids in Khan Yunis, but he has also accompanied his father to funerals in the surrounding villages: Absan, Beni Suhila and Al-Garara. He then visited the mourners' homes, made inquiries about the victims, kissed the parents' hands and did not neglect to say the appropriate words of consolation that his father had taught him. Attia puffed out his chest in pride as he related this, stressing that thanks to this, he will die a shahid and tell the shahids who went before him about their parents and about what occurred during the mourning period, and therefore they will be his friends and he will feel right at home.

The fourth, Said, who also looked like the youngest of the bunch, listened to their stories with a long face. He has attended only a small number of funerals, he said, only funerals of shahids who were killed in Israeli attacks, because his mother does not always allow him to go very far from home.

Everyone in Gaza wants to escape. No one wants to continue living there. And with no other exit, death - for the children, and also for others - is the only way to escape into a better life.

Gaza has been closed and cut off for more than seven years now - in effect, since the outbreak of the second intifada. Its 1.5 million residents feel as if they were hostages, with no hope of release from the continuing suffering and with no one trying to protect or even encourage them. Bombardments, casualties, destruction and bloodshed are their lot. Fear and distress are an inalienable part of their lives. They view themselves as though they were condemned to death. If their neighbor was killed today, then tomorrow or the next day it will be their turn to meet the angel of death. One inhabitant of the Jabalya refugee camp told me that even in his dreams, he does not allow himself to think about anything except the meeting with death.

And thus the thoughts of many Gaza residents are devoted not to ways to improve their quality of life - that, after all, is impossible - but rather to the moment when they will meet up with death. For death in the streets of Gaza is palpable, near at hand, lurking in every corner, in every alley, and there have even been those who went to sleep at night only to have their bodies extricated from the rubble the next morning.

An inhabitant of Rafah told me that he shuts himself into his home for most of the day and locks the door, putting himself under voluntary arrest. Anyone who walks in the street - coming home from work, shopping at the grocery store or heading to the beach - endangers his life, he said. Not that home is safe, he hastened to add. No place is safe in the Gaza Strip. No one here has immunity, and home can also turn into a deathtrap.

Najwa Sheikh lives in the Nuseirat refugee camp. She is married and the mother of two. Recently, she gathered her courage and sent a letter to Haaretz's Letters to the Editor column (June 1, in Hebrew) in order to cry out, to tell the Israelis about her life in the shadow of air force attacks on her neighborhood. She has no faith in the leadership of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh. As far as she is concerned, a leadership that abandons its citizenry does not deserve respect. Therefore, she wrote, she decided to go over their heads and tell her story to ordinary Israelis. Sheikh told me that she addressed her people's enemy directly because only with this enemy is it possible to make peace, and perhaps her personal story will succeed in transforming the enemy into an interlocutor. She believes that citizens of Israel have influence over the decision-makers in their government.

Workers from Gaza, whose route to jobs in Israel is barred and who feel that the PA is ignoring them, have pursued a similar course. The workers invited me to come film them in the streets of the Jabalya refugee camp. They showed up en masse, as for a demonstration, in front of the Channel 2 television cameras and spoke in Hebrew even when I addressed them in Arabic, knowing that what they said would be broadcast to viewers in Israel. This, too, was an effort to go over the heads of their leaders - who, they say, are in deep crisis - in the hope of creating a direct dialogue with Israeli society.

The sense of hopelessness is also shared by extensive parts of Israeli society: in Sderot, in the western Negev and along the northern border. Noam Shalit, whose soldier son Gilad is being held prisoner by Hamas in Gaza, contacted me with a request that I mediate between him and his son's abductors. With the help of sources in Gaza who are close to the abductors, this became possible: A spokesman on behalf of the abductors agreed to speak with the worried father by telephone in a conversation documented by Channel 2 News. Noam Shalit told me of his distress and sense of loss. He believed that through us, he could extend a hand to his son's abductors, as no one else will do this in his stead. Perhaps, he thought, he would succeed in softening the kidnappers' hearts and they would treat his son mercifully. And that is exactly what Mrs. Sheikh from Nuseirat is asking for: a bit of mercy.

The writer is a reporter for Channel 2 News