MIDEAST BREAKTHROUGH : After Signing, Cynicism, Bitterness Persist : Reaction: ‘Let the last soldier leave . . . and the last prisoner become free, and you will see this celebration,’ one Palestinian says.

Within minutes of Wednesday’s historic signing ceremony in Cairo officially liberating his land, Akil abu Shammala left his television set and took to the streets here.

But it was not in celebration or in protest that he joined hundreds of fellow Gazans outside the barbed wire of the city’s central jail.

Shammala, 41, a former English teacher, spent hours in the afternoon sun at Israel’s military headquarters to wait for something far more concrete, profound and personal: He came for his older brother.

After nine years of an imprisonment that was emblematic of Israel’s 27 years of military occupation in this impoverished, desperate strip of land, Faiz abu Shammala, 44, was among the hundreds of Palestinian prisoners released Wednesday.

They were the first of the 5,000 Palestinians whom Israel promised to free in the three weeks after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat signed an accord on Palestinian autonomy.

Yet even that was not enough for Shammala and hundreds of thousands of other Gazans to rejoice about.

“How can we celebrate in Gaza when we still see the Israeli jails full of prisoners, when we still see the Gaza Strip full of Israeli soldiers?” Shammala asked. “Let the last soldier leave Gaza and the last prisoner become free, and you will see this celebration.”

Such was the mood of cynical anticipation and enduring frustration in this, the land that Wednesday’s agreement frees for a future as uncertain as its present. For most Gazans, who took little more than a passing interest in the drama in Cairo, Wednesday’s events were just another in a series of ceremonies and signings that have brought few tangible changes here.

Most of the estimated 850,000 residents of the Gaza Strip probably followed the signing ceremony on television or radio. Immediately afterward, there were isolated, apparently orchestrated, Palestinian celebrations--and protests too:

* At another entrance to the Gaza City central jail, battle-weary Israeli soldiers in full combat gear endured--with impressive restraint--hours of taunts from Palestinian children as dozens of PLO supporters honked horns, waved flags and chanted slogans of victory. A 70-year-old woman, Umm Hassan Zwaid, whose two sons remain in prison, mounted the hood of a battered Peugeot, holding a huge Palestinian flag in each hand, and wailed with joy before a dozen television cameras.

* In Jericho, Israeli soldiers dragged hundreds of Jewish settlers away from an ancient synagogue where, in defiance of army orders, they had staged a prayer vigil against the autonomy accord, the Associated Press reported.

In the city’s market, a festive mood turned sour when some teen-age boys pelted the police station with bottles and stones until a car with a big Palestinian flag and yellow police siren drove through.

Fatah leader Bassam Khatib jumped out to stop the violence. “You are not doing us any service,” he admonished.

* At the Rafah border crossing from Egypt, at the southernmost point of the Gaza Strip, a handful of buses festooned with banners proclaiming “Welcome! Welcome our heroes, home to our soil!” greeted the first 19 Palestinian police commanders. The senior PLO police officials arrived in Gaza dressed in business suits as the signing ceremony took place to lay the groundwork for a vanguard Palestinian force of 1,500 expected here within the next few days.

“We are ready to start now,” declared Ghazi Jabali, 40, the major general in Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Army who was identified as the leader of the arriving police commanders. “Definitely we will succeed, because we are among our people. If we come even with only the clothes on our back, the people will accept us. We are not an occupation force. We are not a colonizing force.”

But in the simple shops and cafes, the squalid refugee camps, the few modest homes and luxury villas and the cavernous streets that make up the Gaza Strip today, Jabali and his future commanders also are a largely unknown force. Few took note of their arrival. And, as the new Palestinian police spent most of the day with the soon-to-depart Israeli forces, most Gazans echoed the sentiments of skeptics such as Shammala.

This, after all, was still a land under occupation.

Israeli military camps still bristled with heavily armed soldiers. Guard towers were manned with heavy machine guns. Long lines of Palestinians still formed outside the headquarters of Israel’s Civil Administration, the military authority that controls everything from driver’s licenses and electricity bills to garbage collection.

Throughout this trash-strewn area, there were the usual military roadblocks, foot patrols and armed convoys. The Israeli army still controlled the borders, and its longstanding 8 p.m. curfew for all was still in force.

The Palestinian opposition also continued. Even as the autonomy accord was signed, the fundamentalist Islamic resistance group known as Hamas deployed masked men throughout the Gaza Strip to scribble graffiti claiming responsibility for the most recent attack on an Israeli patrol that left three soldiers wounded Tuesday night.

Their spray-painted work proclaimed: “The Cairo agreement represents the peak of mockery, concession and shame and disgraces those who are selling the homeland. The rights of our people are not to be bargained away.”

At the Khuzendar Restaurant, Gaza City’s most popular breakfast spot, a small television carried the Cairo ceremony. Many of the diners spoke of how Arafat had settled for too little in the agreement. For others, the agreement was a good start--but only that.

“Sure, they’re signing. Everybody is signing. (But) it’s not going to affect my life,” observed Abed abu Tibi, 24, a baker who said he spent six months in detention in 1991.

Wael Saleh Nimr, 31, a prominent auto-parts dealer, stayed just long enough for a plate of hummus and left before the signing ended. “Look, for our society and the conditions we live under now, we just don’t feel it’s a very important event,” he explained. “We hear that billions of dollars are going to come in here, but we see nothing. We don’t feel anything concrete that is real and alive. All we see are formalities.

“Sure, everybody here is watching this today,” he said. “But . . . if there was an important soccer match on, they would all be watching it. Me? I’m going to work. Make some money. It’s better than this nonsense.”

But Jabara abu Thabet, another diner and a real estate broker from the town of Khan Yunis, disagreed. “Undoubtedly, this is a turning point in our history, and they will be teaching about this day for generations,” he said.

Outside Gaza City’s central jail, Shammala--who works as a district relief officer for the U.N. agency that looks after Gaza’s hundreds of thousands of refugees--was not so certain. He felt Wednesday’s ceremony was, in itself, hardly encouraging.

He was struck by the hitch that delayed the signing when, on global television, Rabin and Arafat openly disagreed on maps drawn to depict the future Palestinian enclave in Jericho. “Today, as I watched, I felt that if Mr. Rabin is arguing here in front of the world about a few kilometers of land in Jericho, to get the Israelis to withdraw from all of the West Bank will take us another 40 years,” he said. “We cannot wait generations for this, I think.”

For now, Shammala worries most about his generation--his brother and how he will readjust after nine years in Israeli prisons.

“How to rehabilitate my brother to face his sons--he has six children--how to face the streets. These are immediate concerns,” he said. “And the PLO has taken no steps for this. . .

“These are the realities of Gaza right now. So, you tell me, how can there be celebration in such a time?”