Every morning for the past three weeks, freelance photojournalist Ziv Koren has woken up at 4.30am, before sunrise, packed his gear in his jeep and taken to the roads or, more often than not, open fields. The 38-year-old Israeli has been dodging the military police, avoiding barricades and the threat of arrest - or much worse. Koren, who has spent the last 20 years working alongside the Israel Defence Forces, is now forced to sneak into a military zone to cover from a distance the events unfolding in the Gaza Strip.

Since 27 December 2008 Israel has been mounting a military campaign against Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni Islamist paramilitary organisation and political party that governs the strip. Israel's government has justified its offensive by citing a series of rocket attacks, launched on neighbouring Israeli communities by militants. The strikes, and the Israeli response, aren't new - in 2006, Israel launched a full-scale assault on Lebanon after two of its soldiers were kidnapped. But this time, learning from the lessons of the 2006 conflict, Israel has imposed a blanket ban on the international media.

For the past four weeks, foreign journalists and photographers have been barred from Gaza, and the military has patrolled a large zone around the strip. The ban has forced pictures agencies such as Getty Images, Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France Presse to use Palestinian stringers to cover the fighting, while their photographers, stuck outside Gaza, try to find new ways to report a conflict they cannot witness.

'We have three guys working on the Israeli side of the border,' says Hugh Pinney, director of editorial photography at Getty Images. 'There is this closed military zone, and all the media are peeking over the garden fence. My guys are constantly driving around to find a gap or spot where they will get a view into Gaza. The policing of that zone has become a great cause of concern for us.'

His concern is shared. 'The way I'm working right now is extremely frustrating,' says Koren. 'All areas along the Gaza strip are closed, and we're not only talking about Gaza itself. The entire area around the border has become a military zone.'

Barricades

Armed with his two Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III cameras, a 5D Mark II and a series of lenses ranging from 16mm to a whopping 600mm lens (fitted with an extender), Koren wakes up 'very early, before the military police puts up the barricades'. He knows the area well, having worked in the region all his life, so he cuts through open fields to by-pass the barricades. 'It's mostly an off-road job,' he says. 'If you're spotted in the restricted zone, the military police will come to arrest you and bring you back outside'. If that happens, your camera may be seized and your images deleted.

Israel is open about why it's imposed the ban. According to Daniel Seaman, the director of Israel's Government Press Office: 'Any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organisation, and I see no reason why we should help that.'

Media and military specialists trace the policy back to the most-recent conflict in Lebanon when, as former army spokesman Nachman Shai told the New York Times, the media was everywhere. 'Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and confused and destabilised the home front. Today, Israel is trying to control the information much more closely.'

The Foreign Press Association has tried to negotiate entry for a pool of eight carefully selected journalists, and has even gone to the courts to force the military to comply. These attempts have so far failed. 'The media tried to get inside the Strip in a limited pool, but it came to nothing,' says Pinney. 'The only material we get is supplied by the IDF. We still distribute it, but very carefully and marked as being from the IDF.'

Even Koren, who worked for the Israeli army at the beginning of his career and who has followed the IDF for the past two decades, has failed to gain any access. 'My experience has not helped me at all. I've been shooting with the Israeli military for 20 years. I've worked in difficult situations following them in Gaza and the West Bank, but this time it's totally sealed,' he says. 'I'm trying to convince the IDF spokesman to let me be an embed, but no luck so far.'

From a distance

Instead, the media is left struggling to find the highest neighbouring hill from which to cover the conflict. 'There are a few hilltops where you get a view of the strip,' Koren explains, adding that most media companies are concentrated on one, which oversees the north part of Gaza. 'There you'll find all the television networks, but to be honest there's nothing to see from there. Very few photographers and wire agencies are pushing in like me and trying to fight back.

'I've been able to cover the Israeli civilian side of the story,' he continues. 'Pictures of people wounded by the rockets (fired by Hamas militants). But from a military point of view, I've haven't been able to do anything. It's all about sneaking in tocapture a few images. You get some very long shots of something, most of the times some smoke over an area.'

As he speaks, a loud explosion goes off and he interjects: 'Fuck, where did that come from?' before asking nearby photographers: 'Can you see where it fell?' Really, there isn't much to see, he tells me when things quieten down - once again, the action has taken place well beyond his reach.

Each afternoon, or each time he's turned back by the military police, he goes back to the kibbutz he's staying at, nearly 20 miles from the Strip. There he sees another side of the story. 'It's shelled all the time,' he says. 'And I stay just next to an artillery base, so every time (Hamas) shells us, the IDFs fire back and we receive the empty cartridges. It's a complicated situation for very little editorial result.'

Insider job

The other approach is to use local stringers and freelancers, but even they are restricted.

'Inside the Gaza Strip, Getty has a regular stringer, who will source material from other local freelancers,' Pinney explains. 'In this kind of situation, that's all we can do. But the Strip is cut into three specific sections, so it's even impossible to move between these. Nobody knows what the next target will be, so the photographers tend to concentrate on the hospitals instead of the action. A man on the street is taking extreme risks.'

Mohammed Rugailah knows it. A freelance photographer who lives and works in Gaza City, his images of the first week of the offensive were published by the Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo. But even he's been spending most of his time on the roof of one of the city's highest buildings, he tells BJP.

'We often have to evacuate under five minutes, leaving our cameras and gear behind, to wait in the streets wondering if the building will be bombed,' he says. 'It's sometimes very hard to work there, but it's even more dangerous to work in the streets. You spend most of your time looking up and monitoring the planes. They can shoot anywhere, so you want to take as many pictures as possible before having to escape fire.'

Powerless

The embargo imposed on Gaza also adds to Rugailah's woes. 'It's very hard to get an internet connection or even power,' he says. 'The electricity is cut all the time. And if you go out, you can lose some gear when running for cover. I broke the screen of my 5D when running after an attack. It's impossible to find spare parts right now.'

He continues to cover the conflict with a 12 million pixel compact camera, running from one hospital to the next and trying to connect to the outside world to transfer his photographs. Not all of them are picked up - news agencies are being careful about the images they receive from Gaza. However, these stringers and freelancers have been a vital source of information in bringing another viewpoint to the coverage.

'I won't pretend that the coverage has been perfect,' says Pinney. 'But under the circumstances, it's going well.'

In the end, he adds, it all depends on the day and whether the photographer is at the right place at the right time. 'In a situation like this, you do your best. It comes down to experience and luck. Under the constraints everybody is operating under, I'm reasonably happy with what we've achieved.'