GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Without listening to a radio or reading a newspaper, you can learn the news of the day here by scanning the graffiti scrawled on the high white wall that wraps around Islamic University.
There is a list of the week's dead in clashes with Israelis. There are condolences and assurances that it is "though martyrdom that we will end occupation." There is a warning to would-be collaborators with Israel to think hard about their actions.
Near the school's main gate, a message from a political youth movement welcomes new students. A few feet away there is a drawing of an Israeli tank being blown apart, its turret broken and blood gushing from the hatch.
Gaza's walls have become public bulletin boards - newsreels painted in Arabic that speak to the 1.2 million Palestinians who live here. Usually painted in bright red and green during the night, the messages mix community news with political statements, the mundane with the macabre.
They mark deaths, celebrate births, announce weddings, offer condolences, welcome newcomers, advertise sales, give holiday greetings. They boast of bombings against Israel, denounce the United States and offer news of disputes between rival Palestinian factions - reports rarely found in the Palestinian press.
"This is our democracy," says Ziad Said, a 40-year-old elementary school teacher who lives in the Jabalya refugee camp. "It is how we express our opinions. Sometimes you can't say what you want in the papers."
Graffiti emerged as an important system of communication in the late 1980s during the first Palestinian uprising. When Palestinians and Israelis signed peace agreements in the mid-1990s, Gaza's walls were whitewashed and stayed bare. The graffiti returned with the start of the second uprising, in September 2000, with messages glorifying suicide bombers as martyrs headed to paradise.
On almost every street corner is a written warning to Israel that "revenge is coming." American-led efforts to produce a roadmap to peace talks is dismissed as "a road to hell." Anyone calling for a cease-fire is essentially drowned out by the messages on the walls.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist who leads the Community Mental Health Program in Gaza, says the graffiti ignore mainstream views.
"I think it expresses anger, expresses defiance," Sarraj says. "The graffiti crystallizes views with words and pictures of machine guns. It is its own battlefield."
The painted slogans, Sarraj says, do not reflect the more thoughtful conversations going on behind closed doors. "People are very careful not to say what they believe to anyone."
Most graffiti are directed against Israel, and almost all of them invoke God. Various groups take credit for attacks, such as this message on the side of a building in the Bureij refugee camp: "By God's will, the Al Quds Brigades claims responsibility for the explosion that destroyed an Israeli jeep and killed everything inside it."
Another brags about an attack that destroyed an Israeli tank, which the writer mistakenly assumed was built in the United States. Next to a drawing of a broken armored vehicle, someone wrote: "Made in America. Improved in Israel. Destroyed in Gaza."
No wall is immune. The wall of a United Nations health clinic is adorned with a large green grenade. Schools are decorated with drawings of masked gunmen and exploding cars.
A popular spot for graffiti in Bureij is the cinder-block house of Mohammed Dura, a 12-year-old boy who was caught in a gunbattle and died in the arms of his father, a death captured on video that turned the boy into a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
Graffiti there are updated routinely, as is his black and white portrait that stares out from almost every facade. One mural shows two large candles surrounded by the names of more than 30 people who have died.
"This is how I know the people who get killed," says Thaer Ahmed, 14, who was one of Dura's classmates. Ahmed stands stoically on the street and carefully scans for additions. "It's a tribute to have your name up there," he says.
Farther north, in Gaza City, the messages become more political. Near the sea, where one of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's compounds is located, the graffiti support his Fatah political party. "We are all Abu Amar," one slogan reads, using Arafat's nom de guerre. Another says, "Fatah is the only way to free Palestine."
Internal criticism, however, is often carefully couched. "The Qassam Brigades will stand firm against stray winds," someone wrote on a wall in Gaza, referring to a battle between the militant wings of Islamic Hamas and secular Fatah.
A dispute this month between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza's Sheik Radwan neighborhood led to the shooting deaths of Allam Ghubun, 13, and his father, Issam, 34. They were painting over anti-Hamas graffiti in a Fatah-controlled area.
People vowed revenge, and Palestinian police are trying to keep the two sides apart, though gunfire has erupted nightly. Anyone wanting to know about the rift only has to read the graffiti painted on the walls surrounding the Asama'a Elementary School.
"We will get revenge for your blood," a message attributed to Hamas says. Another adds: "We will cut the throats of the ones who committed this crime." Fatah responded on a nearby wall: "No to Hamas after today."
Politics may dominate the graffiti discourse, but some Gazans use the medium for advertising. Ahmed Nasser painted an ad for his telephone company on a wall - his appeal to shoppers next to an appeal to kill more Israelis.
And tucked off one alley in the Bureij refugee camp, one family proudly announced the wedding of a son. Inside a large heart painted next to their front door, the family drew a bride and groom about to embrace under two palm trees and fluffy white clouds.