At home and abroad.

Victims of the Intifada come in many guises. Graduate student Elham Bayour was not shot or injured by Israeli soldiers or settlers, but she was prevented from entering Gaza in November and December to gather information for a research project on women of the refugee camps. Bayour is attempting to complete a master's thesis at California State University at Long Beach on Palestinian women political prisoners. She has travelled to Gaza six times since 1998 to research the lives of this little known segment of the Palestinian population. An estimated 1500 to 2000 Palestinian women have been detained as political prisoners since 1969, yet, to date, no one has studied or written about this unique "sorority."

Owing to the lack of documentation, Bayour's initial trips to Gaza were devoted to gathering basic statistics and interviewing some of these women.

She arrived in Jerusalem at the invitation of Shadia El Sarraj, director of the Women's Empowerment Project, to prepare a proposal for researching the health, education, employment, domestic abuse and political participation of women refugees in Gaza.

At the Erez checkpoint, Bayour faced a brick wall in the form of Youssi Levy, a security officer who told her she must produce permission papers from the US embassy to enter Gaza.

Bayour is an American citizen, but her Palestinian roots are in the Galilee village of Al Bassa, from where her grandparents were expelled by the Israelis in 1948. Three generations of her family have lived in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

"I don't know which is harsher -- to be a refugee in one's own country as Palestinians are in Gaza and the West Bank or in a foreign land," she commented.

When she appealed to the US Consulate, permission to enter Gaza was refused, because, she was told, it would be in contradiction of US official advice, warning Americans against travelling there. On her second confrontation with Levy, she was told she must obtain a working visa to enter Gaza.

Appeals to international organisations, including Save the Children and the International Red Cross to sponsor her entry into the Territories proved fruitless, neither agency was willing to bear responsibility for her entering a war zone. Finally, she was told her entrance was precluded by a military order.

Prevented access to Gaza, Bayour tried to demonstrate her solidarity with the Palestinians by joining martyrs' funerals and visiting the wounded in hospitals. She even had a run-in with an Israeli soldier.

On her second Friday in Jerusalem, Bayour decided to observe Israeli tactics in barring all Palestinian males under the age of 45 from attending Friday prayers at Al Aqsa Mosque.

"Thousands of armed Israeli police and soldiers blocked the gates to the Haram al Sharif," she said. So when it was time to pray, the Muslim men began to pray on Saladdin Street in front of the Damascus Gate. A little boy standing next to me cried out at a soldier, `Why can't I pray in the mosque? Al Aqsa is ours and Jerusalem is ours'.

"The soldier pushed and then slapped the child," Bayour recalled. "I shouted at the soldier in Arabic that the boy was right and that he had no business preventing any of us from praying in our mosque."

By this time, the soldier was directing his full attention on Bayour. He demanded her identity card. "I was shouting in English and Arabic that I didn't have an I.D. card. Several journalists heard me and gathered around us, at which point the soldier seemed to evaporate."

Bayour also visited injured youths who were languishing in Jerusalem's Almaqased Hospital.

"Many of these were students from Gaza who were wounded in the West Bank and because of the total closure of Gaza, could not be transported back to their families," she explained. "These youngsters were not only in physical pain, but were homesick. No one was visiting them. The Palestinian Authority is not doing an adequate job of taking care of them."

Despite an abundance of setbacks, perhaps the biggest disappointment for Bayour was the diminished role of women in this new Intifada.

"In the first uprising, women were fighters, they were imprisoned and tortured more than men. Women broke curfews and led food convoys into their camps, opened their own cooperatives and produced jams, pickles and other foodstuffs. They boycotted Israeli goods and educated their children at home or in underground schools.

"This time, women are taking a back seat. It is very distressing. I attribute this to the fact that since 1993, women's organisations have failed to do their job of mobilising women. In my opinion, they have been corrupted by the small amount of non governmental organisation money that has filtered in. But that is another area of research. Believe me, I intend to look into this and write about it."

When asked if she thinks the people have gained new determination and hope for an independent state through this latest uprising, Bayour replied: "The people watched their situation in 1993 grow from bad to worse. When they had nothing to lose but misery, they rebelled. Their mental health is deteriorating as we speak. People cannot live in such traumatic, stressful conditions indefinitely. Parents do not know if they will be shot or imprisoned when they leave the home, children are not sure if they Frill make it safely to or from school -- if their schools are open. The injured often don't make it to hospitals, the Israelis stop the ambulances and let the wounded bleed to death or throw them into prisons without medical attention. Jobs are non-existent, unemployment exceeds 85 per cent of the work force. The instability is overwhelming and scary. I doubt if any people anywhere could survive this existence."