The Maqusi Towers in Gaza City look a bit like US housing projects. The neighborhood consists of several tall apartment buildings grouped together in the northern part of town. It is also ground zero for Gaza's growing Hip-Hop community. On a recent evening in one small but well-decorated apartment, a dozen rappers and their friends and families relaxed, danced, smoked flavored tobacco, and rapped the lyrics to some of their songs. 

Walk down the unpaved lanes of the Jenin refugee camp, past the many posters of martyrs, and you'll find The Freedom Theatre - a drama school in its third year and a budding acting company that just staged its debut show: a production of George Orwell's Animal Farm. 

While Palestinian leaders have been slowly edging towards reconciliation, its people are still dealing with the aftermath of Israel's latest offensive on Gaza. A group of actors in the West Bank have staged a play which focuses on the injustices of the war. Nour Odeh reports on how Israel's war on Gaza is likely to live long in the minds of Palestinians. 

There was a music school in Gaza. It was just six months old. The school worked out of rented premises in the Palestinian Red Crescent Society building just across the street from the Preventive Security Forces compound in Gaza City. The compound was targeted in the first wave of Israeli bombardments on December 27, and twice more the next day. The five-story building was vaporized; a flat gravel surface is all that remains. 

The International Center of Bethlehem (Dar Annadwa) and the Swedish Christian Study Centre in Jerusalem (BILDA) are preparing once again to welcome young, arts-focused Palestinians and Swedes to Ad-Dar Hall for the annual Dandanat Music Festival. From its beginning in 2005, Dandanat has been a place of cultural and artistic exchange between young people from Palestine and Sweden. Each year, a new group of young artists gather together to interact  

May 2008 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba - Arabic for catastrophe, the expulsion of the Palestinian people and creation of the state of Israel. However, the Palestinian Diaspora decided to commemorate it with a different image: sharing and performing hip-hop. A commemoration concert was recently held here at the Civic Center Plaza and it was free and open to the public. 

The third annual Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival begins this weekend, and features a varied line-up of both traditional modern performances from local and international dance troupes at several venues throughout the city, as well as in Jerusalem, over the next two weeks. The festival opens on Thursday, April 17 and runs through May 6. 

The giant eucalyptus tree in front of the spacious yard of the Centre Culturel Francais (CCF) - or French Cultural Centre - in Gaza is symbolic enough. One of the last such trees that remain in the city, it stands in living memory of Palestinian appreciation of foreign cultures and in testimony to nineteen years of genuine French cultural partnership and cooperation with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.