Beginning on March 16th, the competition brought judges from all over the world to Jerusalem to evaluate students from all over Palestine. Each day a different instrument was focused on: piano, guitar, trumpet, woodwinds, strings, voice, kanoun, oud, and flute. Students performed in both Western and Eastern classical music. This is an account from March 22nd, the day of the piano competition, of students from Gaza who participated in the competition. 

Standing under a canopy just inside Jerusalem's Old City walls, a group of 20 Palestinian children are banging drums, clapping their hands and singing in Portuguese. This is capoeira, the traditional Afro-Brazilian sport that mixes dance, music and martial arts, and it is sweeping through the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Non-profit organisation Bidna Capoeira ('We want capoeira') began offering capoeira classes in March 2011 to children and youth in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the West Bank. Since that time, it is estimated that 800 Palestinian children have taken part in the capoeira programme. 

Elena Lidawi is preparing her piano students to take part in a national competition. Lidawi's students will not perform in front of the judges in person, but by video conferencing. Lidawi teaches at Gaza Music School and the Palestinian national competition they will enter in March and April is only 50 miles away in Jerusalem. But the children are unable to leave Gaza because of travel restrictions imposed by Israel. 

From Surfing to installation art and computer programming, Gaza, which is subject to constant siege-imposed shortages, has no shortage of talent across the board. As incongruous as it may seem to outsiders, some of the pioneering talents in Gaza are in music and sports, while art and information and communication technology are also thriving in the coastal strip. 

Palestine might not seem like a breeding ground for race car drivers. After all, the area is dotted with checkpoints and roadblocks, hundreds of obstacles that can cramp a driver's ability to explore a car's limits. But that hasn't stopped a group of Palestinian women from driving very fast, winning races and making a name for themselves along the way. 

It's official - the children of the Gaza Strip again hold the Guinness World Record for the most kites flown simultaneously - this time it was 12,350. The record was broken at an event organised by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency at Al-Waha beach, Gaza Strip, on 28 July last year. I took the first two photos just before taking up my duties as an "observer" responsible for counting the number of kites flying in my assigned sector between the two sirens signifying the start and end point of the official timing. 

Mai and Amane, Arab Israeli teenagers living in Nazareth, are happy to leave talk about boys and make-up to their peers. They have a political message and they're telling it through rap music. The girls, only 15 and 16, make up the duo "Damar" -- Arabic for "destruction" -- whose mission is to expose what they say is the routine discrimination they experience growing up as part of Israel's Arab minority. 

Balancing message and entertainment, reality and humor, has been a DAM specialty since the group formed in 1999, a precursor to the wave of hip-hop acts that have sprouted more recently not only in Israel and Palestine but across the Arab world, many coming to notice in the recent upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. You don't need to know Arabic; watch the videos for some of DAM's songs and the images of walls, checkpoints, bulldozers, settlements, cleared olive groves, refugees, and rubble make the message plain.