Gazans Not Feeling Very Free

It was just before 2:30 a.m. when the Israeli F-16 came screaming out of the darkness. Salah Shawwa, a 72-year-old retired farmer, said he knew precisely because he was lingering late over a Danielle Steele novel, feeling guilty for not switching off the light.

It prepared him for when the first missile hit the bridge outside his front gate. Shawwa dived out of bed and ran for the hall. The shockwave from the second rocket sent a hail of rubble tumbling onto the bed he had just fled. The third and fourth volleys busted through his bedroom wall and brought the roof and rafters tumbling around his ears, he said.

“They claim since the Israeli withdrawal that Gaza has become free,” Shawwa said one day last week, sitting on a plastic chair in the yard outside the ruins of his house. “[But] they have been bombarding us like this day and night.”

The Israeli decision to unilaterally shut down Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip last summer was a milestone that virtually ended a 38-year occupation of this densely populated finger of farming villages and slums on the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet in the last few weeks, it has become clear that the fighting is far from over and that Israel is not entirely disengaged.

Hundreds of artillery shells have rained down on the northern Gaza Strip in recent weeks in what Israeli army commanders describe as an attempt to clear a buffer zone because of an upsurge of rocket attacks by Palestinian militants on parts of Israel left vulnerable by the evacuation of Gaza.

The Israeli operations have included a dozen targeted killings and shootings of Palestinians mounting attacks as well as airstrikes on targets like the bridge outside Shawwa’s house. Thirteen militants have been killed over the last 2 1/2 weeks, along with a 9-year-old girl who was shot by an Israeli army sniper near the border after wandering away from her house in Khan Yunis. On Monday, a 25-year-old woman was killed near a Gaza border fence. Her family said she was shot by Israeli soldiers; the Israeli military said soldiers had fired warning shots in the air. A handful of other civilians have been lightly wounded. The strikes have been accompanied by repeated sonic booms in the predawn hours, breaking windows and shattering nerves.

Border crossings have also been closed because of the continuing hostilities.

On Thursday, an attack by two Palestinian militants armed with grenades, guns and explosives prompted the shutdown of the Erez border crossing into Israel. Thousands of Palestinians who use the crossing to go to their jobs in Israel were left stranded on the Gaza side, where Israeli soldiers shot two of the militants to death.

The closure came on the heels of a three-week shutdown of the main cargo crossing out of Gaza in January, an interruption that came at the height of the winter export season.

The January move came after Israeli authorities found the beginnings of a tunnel adjacent to the busy Karni commercial crossing. Gaza farmers said the shutout from markets in Europe and the Persian Gulf cost them $20 million and crippled the Palestinian Authority’s attempts to buttress Gaza’s economic revival.

“About 90% of the agriculture of this summer has been lost,” said Salah Abusamadhana, director-general of the economic ministry in Gaza.

“Sometimes, I think it would be better to have the settlers here,” he said, “because they weren’t able to do things like this to them. Sonic booms at 3 a.m. Shelling. It’s the worst kind of terrorism, that’s all you can call it. What else do you call it but terrorism, when your children are kept awake all night long, terrified?”

Israeli officials say they have acted in response to provocations including the firing of more than 10 Kassam rockets from northern Gaza in one recent week alone that reached Sderot, an industrial town of 20,000 just east of the northern Gaza Strip, and other areas. At least two rockets have landed in an area of strategic Israeli installations south of Ashkelon, according to Israeli press reports.

The fact that Israeli civilians are vulnerable hit home clearly Feb. 3, when a rocket fired by Islamic Jihad militants hit a house in the western Negev desert, wounding four members of a family, including a 7-month-old boy who suffered head injuries. Residents there have demanded action.

“The range of Kassam rockets is expanding farther and farther into Israel, and ... it is inconceivable that Israeli citizens should be expected to live under constant threat,” Aviv Lesham, spokesman for the United Kibbutz Movement, told the Jerusalem Post last week.

Israel declared the northern Gaza border area and the sites of nearby former settlements off- limits at night as a buffer zone, and in response to frequent rocket attacks has unleashed a steady barrage of shelling during the day in mostly uninhabited areas just outside Beit Hanoun and other villages.

The Israelis have fired at militants approaching the border armed with rockets and explosives, and have hit suspected militants with tank fire and missiles in other areas, prompting U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to issue a statement last week warning that such actions “place innocent bystanders at grave risk and amount to executions without trial.”

Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant, commander of the north Gaza operation, was quoted by the daily Yediot Aharonot as saying that Israel was making the “most appropriate” response. “It is minute and precision warfare against terrorist elements who are destabilizing the entire Palestinian establishment,” he said.

Leaflets dropped over northern Gaza urged residents to report militants to the Israelis and warned that anyone entering the Israeli-declared buffer zone after 6 p.m. would be shelled or shot.

“They are declaring unilaterally the new border of Israel,” said Shawwa, whose home was hit by the concussion and shrapnel of a missile intended to destroy the nearby bridge, which Israelis believe the militants use to get to the border. “They open the border, they close the border. They permit, and they withdraw permission. No honorable man would accept this state of affairs for long.”

Beit Hanoun was once lush with orange trees. Beginning in 2003, they began falling under the blades of Israeli bulldozers, some of the last of them flattened last year in what was said to be an attempt to eliminate hide-outs for insurgents. The campaign destroyed much of the region’s $27-million-a-year citrus industry.

“In March and April it smelled like Chanel No. 5 around here! And now look what’s happened,” said Shawwa, pointing to the empty fields around the ruins of his house.

His neighbor, Khalil Zaneen, 40, also lost the trees his family grew over three generations, and the bulldozers razed his greenhouses and barns housing 10,000 chickens. With help from international aid agencies, Zaneen last year built two new greenhouses and switched to tomatoes, a lucrative export crop to northern Europe in the chilly winter months. Many of his neighbors switched to flowers and strawberries, also dependent on January export.

The fruit was just ripening on the vine when the border was closed down. Zaneen waited for weeks, watching the fruit turn deep red and his chances of selling it outside Gaza in the West Bank and Europe drop to zero. Elsewhere, farmers with cherry tomatoes fed them to the animals, and sold strawberries at a $6-million loss at local markets. An estimated 30 million flowers have been tossed into the garbage, local agriculture leaders say.

“Basically, the season was closed, and the farmers lost everything,” said Zaneen’s father, Ahmad Zaneen, who heads the local agricultural union.

A number of farmers still have some flowers and cherry tomatoes ready for export. But at the newly reopened border crossing last week, all but six of 34 entry ports into Israel were shuttered -- a common situation -- forcing the Palestinians to limit the number of trucks dispatched to the border with exports, and ratchet down the operations of their factories.

“I want them to work 50% of the capacity, it’s enough for us. Just 50%! But they are working only 20%, and that’s why we have troubles,” Abusamadhana said. “What we really need is from 200 to 300 trucks a day, if they would only allow it. We would have our own national income. We could pay our salaries without donors, without any help. But they don’t want us to have our own economy. They want us to be related to their economy.”

In the end, many Palestinians say the Israeli withdrawal did little or nothing to remove the tight circle that has held 1.3 million Gazans on this sandy strip. The area vacated by the former settlements in the north is a nighttime killing zone, they say, and a newly reopened border crossing into Egypt imposes formidable restrictions on young Palestinian men seeking to leave.

“With this disengagement, Israel has put Gaza in a bigger prison,” said Issam Younis, director of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights.

“You know, the main manifestation of the occupation since 1967 has been the restrictions on movement. Talking about the era before the intifada, the occupation was on the checkpoints, on the borders, control of the entrance and exit of Palestinians and their goods. And you see, they still have full control over this movement, and over the borders,” he said.

“That’s what makes this disengagement not a political process, it’s a pure strategic Israeli security plan,” he said.

“Personally, I don’t feel any change whatsoever in this area since the withdrawal,” said the younger Zaneen. As he spoke, the doors and windows in his house rattled from the explosions outside. He and his father exchanged nervous glances. “Basically, the war has started all over again.”

Times Moscow Bureau chief Murphy is on assignment in the Middle East.