Reporter's Notebook: Inside Hamas

G A Z A   C I T Y, Gaza, June 20 -- Gaza City is not a pleasant place. Mounds of garbage line the roadsides as you pass through the checkpoint from Israel, ramshackle buildings with aluminum roofs, held-down only by cinderblocks, jut-out from everywhere. The city seems to scream of poverty and despair.

Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Its one-time sprawl of "tent cities" built as makeshift refugee camps have evolved into urban sprawl and feature crumbling edifices built on top of one another.

One of the few signs of hope in Gaza is the children — hundreds of them, wherever you go. We stood outside a mosque with a group of kids on a Friday afternoon, under the intense Gaza sun, as the call to prayer wailed from megaphones perched on the minarets above.

The smiles on the children's faces and their eagerness to participate in an impromptu English and Arabic exchange program, belied their gaunt frames and dirt-smeared faces.

Hamas Founder Adored by Followers

When the afternoon prayers concluded, the children, and our news team, all converged on a serene-looking elderly man in a wheelchair, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, an Islamic organization that has claimed responsibility for many suicide bombing attacks in Israel in recent years. The U.S. State Department has Hamas high on its list of terrorist organizations. For a timeline of suicide attacks, click here.

The children we had been talking to, and most of the adults in the area, formed a ring of adulation around Yassin, bending to kiss him and to hear what he would say to a group of Western journalists who looked horribly out of place.

This is why we were in Gaza. We arrived several days earlier to work on a story about Hamas. We were intrigued by the notion that Hamas, though often painted with the broad brush of terrorism, represents much more to the Palestinian people.

With its roots in the old Muslim Brotherhood Organization, Yassin founded Hamas as an Islamic alternative to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, and upon its conception, he established separate military and political branches, each of which was to function entirely independently.