Hope Flickers in Still-Occupied Gaza : Mideast: Despite stalled negotiations on Israeli troop withdrawal, some Palestinians are optimistic about the future. Others have a bleaker outlook.

Almost since birth, 32-year-old Ziad Shaheen has lived beside the towering fence, the guard towers and the machine-gun nests that are the enduring symbols of Israel’s military occupation--the army camp that controls his and tens of thousands more Arab lives just a few feet from his refugee hovel in the heart of this desperate strip of land.

Saturday night, Shaheen felt the worst of it again. An Israeli army foot patrol took him from his home at gunpoint, he said, pushed him against a wall and beat him along with two of his Palestinian refugee neighbors. The soldiers, he said, repeatedly demanded that he identify those who had stoned them earlier in the day.

It was just another day under occupation as hope faded that it actually would be the last.

Yet, on the eve of the date that nearly 80,000 men, women and children in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip had hoped would be the beginning of Israel’s military withdrawal, there was little bitterness in Shaheen’s heart.

“They beat me yesterday. But today, I still welcome the peace,” a bruised Shaheen said, sipping tea in the sand in the shadow of the camp fence. “Some of the people in Gaza agree with this peace plan. Some reject it. Personally, I still welcome it.

“Since I was a kid until now, I am always under occupation. All that time, it’s the Israelis demanding, ‘Where is your identity card?’ ‘Don’t go here.’ ‘Don’t go there.’ I am beaten by soldiers. My cousins are in prison. Enough! It’s time to be free. It’s time to have our land back, even if it’s only a small piece.”

Shaheen’s was only one of nearly 1 million often-conflicting views in Gaza, the impoverished land that was to be freed first, beginning today, under the agreement signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization on Sept. 13 in Washington.

But Shaheen’s also was the most optimistic of the many voices here Sunday, a day offering little impetus for hope.

Negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat that many Gazans believed would pave the way for the scheduled withdrawal stalled in Cairo.

In Jerusalem, Israeli authorities announced no plans to start pulling out the occupation force, a phased withdrawal that was a key component of the agreement signed on the White House lawn three months ago.

On the contrary, Israeli military officials indicated that their forces would be beefed up along Gaza’s main roads and around the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories in advance of threatened demonstrations today by both the settlers and radical Palestinian groups opposed to the peace plan.

“We aren’t taking any chances,” Rafi Peled, Israel’s national police commissioner, told Israeli Army Radio. “In our estimation, the principal source of concern is the Arab side.”

The fundamentalist Islamic party Hamas has called for a general strike throughout Gaza today to protest an agreement that has yet to show any substantive changes in the daily lives of Gaza residents.

Many Palestinian groups have sharply criticized Arafat’s peace plan in recent public debates here. And the armed wings of virtually every Palestinian political group have vowed to continue attacking Israeli troops and Jewish settlers in Gaza until the last soldier withdraws.

There were no concrete signs of an imminent troop pullout Sunday on Gaza’s crumbling streets and in neighborhoods strewn with heaps of trash and human waste. Heavily armed Israeli patrols continued throughout the territory into the night.

“Everybody is just waiting for tomorrow,” said Nasser Yazji, whose family owns the largest factory in Gaza, a soft-drink bottling plant. “This day is the last bullet in the gun of the peacemakers. If nothing happens, nobody will believe in peace.”

“We see just two directions--negative and positive, black and white. And we have a very bad feeling because, until now, nobody knows what will happen, and most people see the negative direction.”

Not even the man Arafat appointed as mayor of Gaza City expected much of substance from the Israelis today, a date Rabin had said was not sacred.

“Something could happen with symbolic value, but nothing substantial,” said Mansour Shawa, a wealthy and prominent Gazan who was handpicked by Arafat to form a new Palestinian municipal council that will govern and reconstruct the ruined territorial capital.

“The euphoria of last September is gone already. I don’t think there will be much trouble at this point. But there is a lot of confusion and fear in Gaza for the ordinary people. They need something to build their hope.”

For Ziad Shaheen and his neighbors who have spent their lives in the squalor of the Jabaliya refugee camp, the most concrete symbol for hope would be the end of the fence that surrounds the Israeli military post in the heart of the camp.

They said they expect it to disappear today, or, at most, within a few days.

If not, he conceded, many minds will change.

“Today, I support the peace. But maybe I will change my mind if it is not a real peace,” said Shaheen, who, like tens of thousands of Gazans, worked for years for the Israelis before the government closed the border to most Palestinian day laborers. “Until then, I think I understand the Israelis.

“They say, ‘You take Gaza and Jericho and prove yourself. Prove you can control it.’ OK. We will try. It’s somewhere to start. The rest will come later. For now, we must get out of this big prison.”