On March 1, the premiere episode of “Sleepless in Gaza...and Jerusalem” aired on YouTube, reports Joseph Mayton at Bikya Masr.

“Sleepless in Gaza...and Jerusalem,” produced by PINA TV Productions for Radiant Circle Productions, is a video diary chronicling the everyday lives of Muslim and Christian Palestinian women.

According to the Jerusalem Dispatch, the series will follow four women: Ashira Ramadan, a Jerusalem-based broadcast journalist; Nagham Mohanna, a documentary filmmaker; Donna Maria Mattas, a 17-year old student and aspiring journalist studying at the Holy Family school in Gaza; and Ala' Khayo Mkari, who works at Caritas, a Catholic humanitarian organization in Jerusalem.

The 90-part series, which the producers call “a human look at the Palestinians,” will air every day with the exception of Friday, the day of public worship in the Muslim community.

According to a press release posted at the Jewish Voice for Peace's blog The Only Democracy?, the program will be broken down into 26-minute segments. Each episode will be edited and uploaded on the same day of its filming.

The series will be directed by Ramzy Khouri and produced by Abdullah Schleifer and Walid Sababa. Schleifer is a professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo and an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.

Speaking of the aim of the program, Schleifer pointed out that its purpose “is to get around the usual rhetoric that often accompanies the talk of Palestinian issues.”

Any discussion of everyday life in Gaza and the West Bank usually carries serious political connotations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, “Sleepless in Gaza and Jerusalem” claims to avoid promoting a particular political message. According to a description posted on the program's YouTube page, “the intention of this series is neither rant nor rhetoric.”

Rather, the website continues, “It is ... an opportunity for all of us, who do not live in Gaza, occupied Arab Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, to grasp how these four young Palestinian women live out their daily lives, precisely because their lives are stories we journalists were taught almost dismissively to think of as 'human interest' and almost necessarily conflict driven.”

The series, documenting the women struggling with personal and career choices, will shed light on daily life in the Palestinian territories. At Bikya Masr, Joseph Mayton recounts that the producers claim the series will prove the women “can also experience moments of personal and community achievement ... even in the most difficult circumstances of siege and occupation.”

As of March 9, the trailer for the program has had more than 4,000 viewers, and there is a media campaign promoting the series. The media campaign includes a Facebook group, and aside from the videos on YouTube, episodes one and two are currently posted at Gulf News.