It’s a Family Matter as Gazans Await Peace at the Jabaliya Refugee Camp : Mideast: Many Palestinians look forward to normalcy. ‘The soldiers will stop coming into our houses and arresting our sons,’ one woman said. ‘We will go out into the streets at night. . . . There will be no curfew.’

For most of his 60 years, Mohammed Msalam’s life has been defined by the conflict with Israel.

In 1948, as a teen-ager, he became a refugee. Later, as a parent, he saw his own sons carry on a violent fight against the Israeli soldiers who patrolled the Gaza Strip.

In a drawer, Msalam keeps a tattered blue notebook, each page divided into a grid of neatly inked entries. Across the page is written the story of one family’s life entwined with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

One of his two sons was jailed by Israel in 1980 after attacking an army patrol with a grenade and was later deported for being an activist in the Fatah wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The family’s home was partially demolished by Israeli army bulldozers in 1981 as a punishment. His other son also was jailed. Mohammed was shot in the leg. One of his nine daughters lost her husband in a clash with Israeli soldiers.

Now, history has written another entry into the family book: Israel and the PLO signed an agreement Sept. 13 to end nearly three decades of warfare. Soon Israeli soldiers will leave the sandy alleyways of Jabaliya and the Palestinians will be left to run their own affairs.

In the West Bank and Gaza, the accord has unleashed a torrent of speculation about whether the Palestinians will get billions of dollars from the World Bank, whether Gaza can become a new Hong Kong with a busy international port, or whether PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat knows how to run a government.

But at the level of Mohammed Msalam and his family, the vision of peace is far less grand. As they talked about their hopes and fears recently, they spoke in terms of simple dividends. The conflict has touched each of them so deeply that just the absence of conflict will be a profound change.

If the Msalam family is any indication, it will not take much to satisfy the expectations of most Palestinians for peace. Exhausted from years of conflict, they are looking forward to a period of normalcy. They are willing to be patient about the enormously complex process of building their own state.

They have ambivalent feelings about Israel; while they might take a day trip to Tel Aviv after the peace agreement, most are looking forward to the coming divorce from the Jewish state.

The main benefit Msalam and his wife, Amna, want from peace is the return of their deported son, Moen, 34, now working for the PLO in Tunis.

“Life will be completely different,” said Amna Msalam, who was born in Battani, the same small Arab village as her husband, near what is now Ashdod, Israel. Barely a child when her family fled to Gaza, she later reared 11 children in the simple, open, cinder-block home in Jabaliya, the most populous of the refugee camps.

“We will get rid of all kinds of suffering,” she said. “The soldiers will stop coming into our houses and arresting our sons. We will go out into the streets at night, to attend wedding parties. Now, we lock the doors every night at 7:30. When there is peace, there will be no curfew.

“What will happen to us, I don’t know yet,” she added, her small cherubic face smiling under a white scarf. “If there is a Palestinian government, our lives will change. We will have work. Will we get a new house? I don’t know.”

Since 1948, Palestinian leaders have done little to improve conditions in the squalid refugee camps such as Jabaliya, preferring to keep them as a symbol of the refugees’ displacement and temporary status. But the reality is that many of the camps long ago became permanent homes for the refugees while their villages disappeared.

One of the major questions facing a new Palestinian government is whether to finally provide better housing and services for what the United Nations estimates to be 308,000 refugees in Gaza’s eight camps and 252,000 outside them.

“First of all, the most important issue is to rebuild the refugee camp, with sewerage, water, electricity, public gardens and hospitals,” said Rafik, Mohammed’s younger son. “Look at Jordan. Fifty years ago it was just tents, and now it is high-rise towers and beautiful villas! And the majority of those who built it are Palestinians. The Palestinians build other countries, too, in the gulf. The Palestinians made heaven from desert in the gulf.

“We have been living tens of years without a state,” he added. “Now we have been given the opportunity, so let us take five or 10 years to build up a state.”

Rafik was born the year after Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war. He exudes the intensity of a young Palestinian schooled in Ketziot, the Israeli detention center in the Negev desert, where the older prisoners educated the younger ones in doctrine of the intifada, the Arab uprising against Israeli occupation. They called Ketziot the “College of the Intifada.”

Last year, Rafik was studying for first-year exams in pharmacy at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. A month before the exams, he was arrested and placed in administrative detention.

“In peace, I’ll be able to go to the university without obstacles,” he said, carrying a tray piled high with a midday dinner of grilled rabbit and chicken to the table. “And when there’s a Palestinian government, all the facilities will be as good as anywhere in the world.”

Rafik laments that in recent years wealthy Palestinians fled to Europe for their studies, leaving only the poor here. “When we have a Palestinian state,” he said, “it will try to create education equal to what’s outside.”

Mohammed, who tends gardens and makes repairs at the Quaker facility in Gaza, had his own brush with violence one night when a group of armed, masked men demanded he step outside his house and accused him of being a collaborator with the Israelis. Mohammed said he believes they were actually collaborators themselves, working with the Israeli security service.

“I told them, ‘I am an ordinary person, what do you want?’ ” he said, but they fired two bullets into his left leg.