With Israeli bombs still falling on Gaza and gunmen feuding in its streets, dreams of peace are fading fast.
The Palestinians in Gaza have come to dread the phone ringing at midnight. Too often a stranger's voice, in flawless Arabic, will say, "I'm from the Israel Defense Forces. This is a warning. We're going to bomb your house in 15 minutes. Leave and tell your neighbors." Usually the Israeli intelligence is accurate--Gaza seethes with Palestinian informers--and the bombs, dropped by an F-16 fighter circling this narrow coastal strip on the Mediterranean, will destroy a hideout, weapons cache or hidden tunnel.
But often those warnings aren't enough to save the innocent. One day last month, the Israelis dropped two enormous charges on a house in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, where smugglers were trying to tunnel into Egypt under a 25-ft.-high concrete wall built by the Israelis. There had been the usual telephone heads-up, but the blasts were so fierce that flying debris injured 50 neighbors. A spear of shrapnel flew more than 500 yds. away and killed a 14-year-old girl, Damilaz Hamad. According to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Damilaz is among 60 women and children killed in air strikes since June, when Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in response to the abduction of an Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit. At Damilaz's funeral, militants in black T shirts fired AK-47s in the air. On a white wall, someone had sprayed the words CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FAMILY FOR THE MARTYRDOM OF DAMILAZ HAMAD. The only genuine grief was from the girl's paraplegic mother, who lay crumpled on a mattress on a dirty floor, wailing for her lost daughter. I listened to friends trying to convince the family that Allah had singled out Damilaz, instead of all the ruffians and murderers in this blighted stretch of Gaza, for an early death because her suffering was sure to be rewarded in paradise. Otherwise, my interpreter explained to me, "her death will seem pointless, and her family will grieve more."
For the Palestinians, sorrow has become routine. While the international community has committed itself to enforcing the two-month-old cease-fire between Israel and Hizballah in Lebanon, the siege of Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants goes on, battering the territory's infrastructure, paralyzing its economy and leaving what's left of the Palestinian government in chaos. As Israeli warplanes attack from the air--all told, their bombs have destroyed 43 buildings and killed more than 220 people, most of them suspected militants--the two rival Palestinian political factions, the Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamic militants of Hamas who back Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, have engaged in daily gun battles that left more than a dozen dead in three days of fighting last week. At this point, Palestinians seem to think they are closer to seeing civil war than to realizing their dream of a viable, independent state. "We are used to blaming our mistakes on others," says Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad in a moment of candor. "But we have all been attacked by the bacteria of stupidity."
If so, the world isn't offering much in the way of treatment. When U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Israel and the Palestinian territories last week, she offered $26 million in aid to bolster Abbas' security forces. But she also outraged Hamas leaders by encouraging Abbas to dismiss Haniya and his Cabinet and scrap efforts to forge a coalition government with Hamas. Now Hamas militants are threatening more trouble if the Prime Minister is forced out. Meanwhile, the living conditions continue to deteriorate. Because of a blockade imposed by Israel after Hamas was elected to the Palestinian government in January, only Israeli foodstuffs and humanitarian aid are allowed into Gaza. (Palestinians are barred from exporting any homegrown products, and Israeli shells have destroyed more than 40 greenhouses built by the aid agency CARE International.) The Israelis also imposed a sea blockade after its navy stopped arms smugglers and two suicide bombers trying to reach Israeli shores. John Dugard, U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, concluded in late September that "Gaza is a prison, and Israel seems to have thrown away the key."
A tour through Gaza provides glimpses of the miseries faced by ordinary people. Because of the Israeli clampdown, fishing boats cannot venture more than a mile into the Mediterranean without getting shot at by Israeli warships. But the fishermen go out anyway. Abu Audah, a Palestinian boatman, points to three large-caliber Israeli bullet holes in the hull of his vessel and explains, "If I stay at home, I'll die of hunger. So it's better to die at sea, feeding my children." A boat strayed too far out last week, and a fisherman was killed by shots from an Israeli vessel.
Since June 28, when Israeli fighter jets bombed Gaza's main power station, most people have had only four hours of electricity a day. Gaza's hospitals are pitiful, and more than 400 Palestinians with life-threatening illnesses or injuries were made to wait three weeks before the Israelis opened up the Rafah crossing to allow Palestinians into Egypt for urgent medical treatment. Gaza has food, but few Palestinians can afford it, since the government can no longer pay the salaries of the police, teachers and bureaucrats. More than 70% of Gazans are dependent on international food aid to survive. As poverty tightens, many families have run out of friends to borrow from and are starting to sell their furniture and even dowry jewelry to put food on the table. Some have gone further; secondhand-clothing shops are now all over Gaza's poorest neighborhoods.
For Israel and the U.S., the squeeze on Gaza was intended to have corollary benefits: sowing discontent with the Hamas-led government and strengthening Abbas, whom Israel sees as its only viable negotiating partner. But neither has happened yet. Sources close to Abbas say Rice has promised that sanctions will be lifted and funds will flow back to the Palestinians once the Israeli corporal is freed and the President dissolves the Hamas government. But Abbas, despite being the Bush Administration's favorite, could end up the loser. Many Palestinians see him as weak and fickle. Hamas' gunmen are more numerous and better disciplined than Abbas' Fatah fighters, who have splintered into rival militias whose main activity in Gaza these days is stealing cars and kidnapping. "Our image in the streets is very bad," concedes a senior Fatah official. "We are seen as self-interested and collaborators [with Israel], not fighters for Palestine. And this is what Abbas is ignoring. You can't confront your political adversaries without the support of the masses."
Here's how a civil war could start. Islamic preachers under Hamas' influence begin denouncing Abbas in mosques as a stooge of the U.S. and Israel, undercutting his credibility. Hamas would then use its majority in the legislative body to try to oust Abbas as President. If that were to fail, Hamas' fighters would take to the streets in Gaza and the West Bank territories. Such an internecine conflict would devastate the Palestinians, since many families have fathers who support Abbas and sons who belong to Hamas. And the consequences for Israel could be just as dire. A senior Hamas commander says the rift with Abbas is unmendable. Although Hamas has agreed to halt its campaign of suicide bombings in Israel, the commander says, "I'm afraid that [pressures from the] Americans and Israelis are pushing radicals inside Hamas to resume such attacks." And if that happens, Israel's wrath against the Palestinians would surely be even more terrible.
The danger for Israel--and the world--is that the longer the siege of Gaza lasts, the more likely it is to strengthen radicals who have little interest in a peaceful settlement of the dispute with Israel. Despite the blockade of Gaza, many Palestinians still have a few good memories of Israelis. Feheme, an 11-year-old Palestinian boy with blood cancer, was twice treated in Jerusalem and still gets follow-up calls from his doctor. A farmer whose orange groves were shelled 12 times by Israelis after militants set off a rocket in a nearby field still talks fondly of his Israeli friends. But although he opposes the Palestinian militants and the rain of destruction they attract from the Israeli side, he says that "if I start complaining about the militants' setting off these rockets, they'll shoot me."
If the Israelis thought their siege of Gaza might break Palestinian support for Hamas, they were wrong. It has only made Palestinians angrier and more desperate. Says Gaza resident Omar Shabani, an economist: "My kids ask me why the Israelis are doing this to us, and I can't answer them. I don't want to increase their hatred toward Israel, but the truth is, the Israelis are doing everything to make us hate them."
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