COLUMN ONE : Bitterness Clings to Gaza’s Soul : Years of Israeli occupation have spawned deep-rooted distrust. A fiery guerrilla, a frustrated doctor, a broken-hearted father are among Palestinians who ponder the promise of peace.

Rayad abu Kamar couldn’t take his hands off his AK-47 assault rifle. The young Palestinian fighter cocked it and uncocked it. He popped the ammunition clip in and out a dozen or more times. He stroked the barrel as he explained why he chose war in this bitter, desperate land where there are no signs of a promised peace.

“When I got out of jail, my first thought was, ‘Hey, I’m free,’ ” said Kamar, 21, a fugitive rebel with the Fatah Hawks of Gaza, a group linked to the Palestine Liberation Organization and its chairman, Yasser Arafat.

Hundreds of prisoners like Kamar were released from Israeli jails in response to Arafat’s effort to forge a peace with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

“The feeling didn’t last an hour,” Kamar said. “When I got home, suddenly I felt no different than before. I felt as if I have traded my small jail cell for a bigger one. That is Gaza: An open-air prison for nearly 1 million of us Palestinians. So, I decided to fight. And this is the only way I know.”

Kamar’s story is more dramatic than most. But it echoes those of many Gazans. They now are filled with more fear than hope, as this occupied land and the world outside it anxiously wait to learn if Israel and the PLO really can cease their combat.

Gaza--long occupied, densely populated and wretchedly poor--is a site of enduring despair. There are people here even more embittered than Kamar, among them a surgeon who has seen the worst of Gaza’s long wait for freedom.

But this is also a place where some hold faint though durable glimmers of hope, including a 45-year-old used-clothing vendor who supports Arafat’s peace, even after it cost the life of his son.

Their individual stories tell much about the prospects for this territory of Palestinians, which is to be the first freed from Israeli occupation; what happens here will have a decisive effect on the future of the entire region, for this is to be the nucleus of an autonomous Palestine under Arafat’s “Gaza-Jericho first” accord.

For now, however, this land is spiraling not toward peace but deeper into violence and anarchy. The daily staples here are death, poverty, hate and fear. After 26 years of Israeli military occupation--the last six of them under the Palestinian intifada (uprising) that transformed the territories into war zones--decay, defiance and despair still grip Gaza.

Impassioned Guerrillas

By the time he was born, the Gaza Strip had been under Israeli occupation for six years, Rayad abu Kamar said. The youngest member of a refugee family that has lived 2 1/2 decades in the largest, poorest of the strip’s half-dozen camps, Kamar recalled a childhood filled only with the barbed-wire fences, armed soldiers, ever-changing rules and border guards--the enduring symbols of Gaza’s occupation.

By age 15, Kamar was in jail. He had been working underground for Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO, organizing youth groups. Of the six years since, Kamar spent three of them in Israeli cells.

But recent events have convinced Kamar that his only chance to free himself and his people from the larger prison of Gaza itself is to shoot his way out. So it was that Kamar, fidgeting intently with his AK-47 on the floor of a gas-lit safehouse in the Jabaliya camp of his birth, found himself talking more about the mechanics of war than his own leader’s call for peace.

Kamar and the seven other young, armed Fatah Hawks from throughout the strip spent the first 10 minutes on weaponry: Was Abed Hakim Wadi’s Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun better at killing Israelis than Sami Hamada’s Czech-made rifle? Then they compared notes: Who had been shot at by the Israelis that day?

When the subject turned to politics, it was hardly surprising that all eight Hawks agreed: None would surrender their weapons--despite Arafat’s orders--until the last Israeli soldier leaves the Gaza Strip.

“Look, I am still a hunted man,” Kamar said. “The Israelis only say in the newspapers and TV that we are free now. Today, the undercover forces chased after me twice. They shot at me as I ran. One of our leaders, Ahmed abu Rish, was gunned down by the Israelis just last week. OK, they said it was an accident. But this is what is happening every day here. Is this how you treat free men?”

The others nodded and recounted similar tales. All agreed they must first see Arafat’s Palestinian security forces take control of Gaza and Jericho before they even consider handing in their hard-earned weapons, most stolen from Israeli victims.

It was only when they were asked if they hoped to join the new Palestinian police force that the bravado of war suddenly gave way to a glimpse of the strip’s deep hunger for peace. Only the group’s leader, Ismail abu Khomsan, said he would try to enlist.

Sami Hamada jumped to his feet. He threw his rifle on the floor. And the veteran urban guerrilla who has spent nine months in the Hawks shouted: “The Israeli forces want me now. They want to kill me! But when the peace will come, when the Palestine government comes to Gaza, I hope I never see this gun again. I don’t care even if I am a garbage collector--just that I am free and safe in my own country.”

Poverty and Madness

In Gaza, the few paved streets are roller-coaster tracks through cavernous potholes and craters. The dirt lanes of its ramshackle refugee camps--the tin and cinder-block sprawls that are home to nearly two-thirds of its 900,000 or so residents--become rivers of mud, sewage and human waste in the winter rains.

Every open lot is a garbage pit, urban fields of refuse where sheep and goats graze on an assortment of trash that defines the Gazans’ meager diet: Lemon rinds, fish skeletons, rotting lettuce, bread crusts and half-eaten vegetables blackened by the sea air. Meat bones are rare; empty liquor bottles unknown--Muslim fundamentalist groups banned alcohol de facto throughout the strip several years ago.

There is no night life. An 8 p.m. curfew is strictly enforced by heavily armed Israeli patrols, which scour silent roofs and doors with searchlights nightly. The only diversion in most homes is an aging television set that delivers Arabic-language newscasts from Israel, Jordan or Egypt.

Gaza’s economy is as occupied as its land.

Draconian licensing rules require Israeli permits for every new business, every new house, every new water well--every change, no matter how minor, in the Gazan landscape. Israeli troops control the borders; Israel has the final say on everything and everyone that passes. With a single decision nine months ago, Israel unilaterally sealed Gaza off to most Palestinian laborers; the unemployment rate soared overnight from 20% to the current 60%.

The Israeli civil administration that has unchallenged authority to manage the strip lays down the law for almost every aspect of daily life.

The Israelis decide where the thousands of fishermen can fish, how much the Gazans must pay in taxes, where they can drive and what they can import to eat. One new regulation orders a $50 fine for anyone caught driving without a sewing needle--a requirement, the Israeli administrators ruled, to ensure the smooth functioning of windshield wipers.

For months, since the September signing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, Gaza’s economy has turned sharply worse. It is frozen. Fearing the peace will bring only more war, few Gazans are buying.

Amid unprecedented poverty, most are desperate to sell. Taxi drivers are flogging battered cars just to feed extended families that can run into the dozens. The price of weapons is soaring--a threefold increase in the past month.

And, when the subject turns to the future, there is far more talk in the marketplace of helplessness than of hope.

Through the decades, that despair and its accompanying violence have spread a kind of madness throughout the strip, a classic syndrome of victimization that Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a Gazan and one of just seven psychiatrists here, said bodes ill for the future. It is similar, he said, to what is seen in South Africa’s black townships.

Already, more than half of Gazan children have watched their fathers being beaten by Israeli soldiers, according to a four-year study by Sarraj’s Gaza City mental health center. He said the study found that more than 85% of the children have witnessed night raids by Israeli soldiers.

Gaza has double the world average of clinical depression, six times the average cases of paranoia and four times the incidence of adult anxiety.

In all, Sarraj said, 140,000 Gazans are in critical need of psychiatric care.

“You have a generation of children who have lost their childhood,” he said. “You have scars that will take a generation to heal. And you have a generation of victims who now are likely to imitate their aggressors.

“I look at the whole conflict here as a perpetual cycle of aggression and victimization. And this is where we have to work very hard. Now we have a generation of potential new aggressors coming in--the PLO--who have themselves been beaten, defeated and victimized. For sure, there will be cases of abuse, victimization and aggression against their own people here--the need to create a new victim. So now, everyone is afraid--of everything.”

It is against that backdrop, those scars and fears, that Gaza’s generations of victims are choosing their future course, individual decisions that most said they increasingly see as black or white, war or peace.

A Disillusioned Doctor

On the southern end of the Gaza Strip, Dr. Hanni Jabour kicked the pitted linoleum beneath his plastic sandals and shook his head. The blood wasn’t dry yet on his hospital gown. A local youth had just made his choice: He opted to join the Fatah Hawks for the same reasons as those who had gathered in the Jabaliya safehouse the night before.

Jabour is an emergency-room surgeon at Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Yunis. He is one of 70 Palestinian doctors for a population of 250,000 in Gaza’s southern sector. Moments before, the doctor had sewn up the knee of a refugee day-laborer, a 48-year-old Palestinian stabbed by his 19-year-old son--the new Hawk.

The son, Basam Aram, had tried to kill the Jewish man who employed him and his father. The Israeli, one of 3,000 settlers on the strip, had given Aram and his father $10-a-day jobs in his vegetable fields. Such jobs are among the little work available in Gaza these days.

With each knife thrust, the settler had screamed louder for help. The father tried to save the Jew from his son, who fled after stabbing the settler seven times, his father once and giving in, his friends said later, to a shared sense of frustration, hatred and fear. Basam Aram stole the settler’s submachine gun and went to join the guerrilla war.

For Jabour, as for many other well-educated Gazans who reject the Arafat-Rabin peace plan, the only hope left is the war that so many other Gazans fear. Of the two, the doctor favored the acts of the son over those of the father.

“This, what you see today, is because of Arafat. Arafat knows nothing about the Gaza. It’s because of his policies that families are now tearing apart like this,” said Jabour. He has sewn up hundreds of stab wounds, bullet holes and rifle-butt gashes every month for seven years with too few sutures and too little medicine from the Israeli civil administration, which, he and most Gazans said, grossly mismanages Gaza’s hospitals, schools, local governments and most other institutions in the occupied lands.

“We are forced to live like animals, and Arafat is giving away what little we have left--our pride. For me, I want the intifada back. We must rise up and fight again, as we have for the past six years. The Jews took our land by force. Now we must take it back by force. This is the only way.”

Jabour thought for a moment of his own children--three young girls and a boy. “If the peace process fails, it would be better for my children,” he said. “Maybe you ask why. If this agreement fails, the intifada will continue, and I promise you the Israelis will leave Gaza anyway. They will leave without a peace process, without the TV cameras, without Washington or Cairo. And I would be proud even if my own children were martyrs of this fight.”

A Sad Father’s Hope

Mohammed Migdad spent hours retelling the death of his son. Every detail, he said, was as fresh--and as real--as the smell of Hazem’s blood that night. And none of it was worth the price.

Surely, he conceded, it was not for martyrdom that Hazem Migdad’s life ended at age 15 in the Sheik Radwan section of Gaza City on Nov. 30. Even the Israeli authorities acknowledged later that it had been a case of “mistaken identity” when an army patrol gunned down Hazem around the corner from his home.

The soldiers were searching for other boys who had opted for the armed rebellion after Arafat’s accord. And Hazem at the time happened to be exchanging a video-game cassette at a nearby shop.

But the mistaken killing of his son was not without broader meaning for Migdad, 45, a used-clothing vendor who runs his shop from a room of his house. He recalled the fateful evening when Israeli troops swept his neighborhood; his son had gone out moments before.

“It was already dark. But a few minutes later, I heard five shots. We ran toward the spot. I looked. I saw a boy fall down. I rushed toward him. But an Israeli officer stopped me. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I think that’s my son!’ ‘No!’ he said. ‘Go home.’

“It was almost an hour until we heard the ambulance that took him away,” he continued. “I know that boy was alive when we saw him fall. I could hear noises from him. But, by the time the ambulance and the soldiers left, and I could go to the spot again, all I could find was the blood. It was like a lake in the street. I put my hand in it, I smelled it. And I knew. This was my son.”

A few hours later, the Arabic news on Radio Monte Carlo--a preferred source of independent information for most Gazans--confirmed Migdad’s fears. And two days later, the Israeli civil administration that runs Gaza made it official.

“The military governor said he called me in to apologize. He said, ‘I ask God to give you another boy.’ But this is not possible. I raised this boy for 15 years. Look what I am doing to live. I sleep in the sand. I work all my life with my hands to raise him, educate him, feed him. And to lose him in a second. Can you imagine this?

“The governor offered me coffee,” he added. “I refused. He insisted. He said, ‘With this new peace, we will soon be brothers.’ I still refused. I said, ‘We Arabs, we drink coffee only with our friends. And we are not even friends.’ I said, ‘This peace between Arafat and Rabin, we don’t want it, if we must watch our children die before our eyes.’ ”

As Migdad retold the story at home over coffee with friends days later, though, his tone had softened. He asked one of his eight surviving children to fetch a wall portrait from the next room--a large photograph of Arafat.

“Look, this man signed an agreement,” Migdad said, his calloused hands holding Arafat beneath his graying beard. “He gave his word, and ours. We have to respect it, no matter what happens today, or tomorrow. If Arafat was not a good man, I would not keep this picture in my house.

“My son is dead, murdered by the Israelis after they announced this peace,” he said. “And still I love this peace. I am a refugee from the 1948 war. I was born that very year on the roadside, while my parents fled the Israeli army. Now it is possible there will be a Palestinian government here.

“This is a start,” he added. “If the Palestinian government comes, I am sure the life will be better for my children. And if it doesn’t happen, their lives will be worse even than my own. After what happened to my son, it is not easy to believe in this.

“But for my country? For peace? For my other children?” he asked. “Really, these things are more important. We Palestinians are weak now. The Israelis are strong. So this isn’t just the best choice. This is our only choice left right now. But will it succeed? Only God can make it happen.”