For the past week, our local newspapers and television have been preoccupied with three main themes: feel-good features about Christmas, horror stories about murderous ex-husbands dressed like Santa Claus, and expanded coverage of multiple waves of bad weather (snow, fog, ice, snow, and ice-jammed flash flooding).

Pushed to the margins of the news (here, at least) has been the recent conflict between Israel and the Hamas-led Palestinian government in Gaza. Network news gives broad overviews, without any discussion of the conflict’s effect on normal, everyday people there.

The Mideast Youth blog today features a podcast interview with Ramzi, a teacher living and working in Gaza. Ramzi is an occasional contributing writer to the site, and he offers a first-person account of what was happening there over the weekend. With no electricity, and access to food and medical supplies, the picture he paints is grim.

Mideast Youth is a non-profit news blog covering North Africa and the Middle East. Their goal is “to prove the fact that diversity is powerful and positive, and [that] we should find ways to coexist for the sake of a better and more productive Middle East.”

The site features contributions from a wide geographic area, and a similarly broad range of personal, political, and religious perspectives, by their own description including “Palestinian Christians, Arab Jews, Armenians, Iranian atheists, Israeli soldiers, Sudanese poets, Pakistani activists, Kurdish students, Arab Americans and many more representing different sects, social class, nationalities or religions.”

The feed to subscribe to the Mideast Youth podcast is here.