COLUMN ONE : Bittersweet Reunion in Gaza : A family splintered by exile and occupation will finally come together under self-rule. They will share hopes and memories--and mourn a brother killed just months ago.

As they began to reunite from throughout the Arab world with tears of joy and loss--a catharsis that was a quarter-century of occupation and separation in the making--the Danaf family of Gaza City had much to catch up on last week.

Shawky Danaf had to break the worst of it to his half brother, Arafat, who arrived in an Iraqi paratrooper’s uniform along with hundreds of other Palestinian police officers in newly autonomous Jericho. After four years of war and isolation with the Palestine Liberation Army brigade based in Baghdad, the news was hard for Arafat to bear.

Their brother Mohammad was dead, Shawky told him by phone in a voice choked with pain. He had been shot and killed by Israel’s occupation army three months short of this greatly anticipated reunion--the coming together of a family long divided, like so many in the occupied lands. Just before his death, Mohammad had spoken of this reunion as a dream more distant only than the dream of living together with his exiled father and four half brothers in a liberated Palestinian land.

By the end of their conversation, both Shawky and Arafat were in tears.

The Danafs’ saga speaks volumes about the events unfolding at ground zero of the Middle East conflict, as Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization finally have begun the first concrete steps toward peace.

They are a family of simple poverty among hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who are beginning the long process of erasing the distance and pain of exile and occupation. And like the peace process itself, the Danaf reunion is far from complete. In fact, it has just begun.

The family’s father, a former Palestinian fighter named Hassan, fled to Gaza with his first wife from their Arab village in southern Israel in 1948, when the Israeli state was carved out of British-ruled Palestine. Nineteen years later, he fled again after the Arabs lost the 1967 Middle East War. He left his wife, three sons and two daughters in Gaza, bounced from Arab land to Arab land and finally settled with a second wife in Egypt, where he fathered two sons and two daughters.

As the surviving half brothers--two in Gaza and two in the Palestinian brigades destined to serve the autonomous zones--anticipate their imminent reunion, it is Arafat and the slain Mohammad who best symbolize both the decades of Israeli occupation and the peace-building task now at hand.

The Danafs’ complex story was gleaned in more than a dozen visits to their home and to a Gaza City cafe that Mohammad had opened last year while unemployed--to keep from going mad, he said.

It is the story of the splintered and often confusing relationships that typify Gazan families, of lifetimes of desperation and fading hope now turned to bittersweet joy. And it is a story that demonstrates the human impact of the beginning of both the end of Israel’s 27 years of occupation in the former Palestine and of the effort still needed to restore enough hope to build Gaza and Jericho into the core of a future Palestinian land.

Shawky, 32, and Arafat, 19, spoke for the first time in years when Shawky delivered the news of Mohammad’s death in the phone call to Arafat’s military post. Gaza and Jericho, the two autonomous Palestinian zones, are still divided by dozens of miles of Israeli territory. A promised route for Palestinian safe passage is still weeks--or months--away.

Not even Arafat’s mother, Rida Wahbeh Abdul-Rasoul, who traveled from Cairo to Gaza two weeks ago to begin the reunion, can see him yet. The Egyptian second wife of Hassan came to Gaza not only to meet the other half of her husband’s family but also to see her own sons, Arafat and Sabar, for the first time in years.

Then last week, on the day Palestinian extremists gunned down two Israeli soldiers near the Gaza border, Israel sealed off Gaza for at least nine days, a further obstacle to the reunion.

Mohammad and Shawky’s mother--Halima Abu Obeid--had little time last week for the problems of her husband’s second wife. After all, Hassan had abandoned her when Mohammad, Shawky and the eldest brother, Ibrahim, 36, were children, fleeing into exile.

Nonetheless, Halima said, Rida was living with her in Gaza now. Arafat and Halima’s other stepson, Sabar, 25, are almost home after serving in exiled Palestinian brigades in Iraq and Libya both during and after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Sabar, due to arrive in Gaza any day with his delayed brigade from Libya, was “a carbon copy” of Mohammad, Halima said.

“When my husband called this morning from Cairo, he asked how I was feeling now with the boys coming home,” she recalled. “With him, I can still speak freely. I said, ‘I still feel a great sadness. My hand is not complete. Still a big finger is missing. Our son Mohammad is gone. We have lost him. And nothing can bring him back.’ ”

An amateur poet, cafe owner and singer in a local band, Mohammad was hardly known outside his gritty neighborhood of Sheikh Radwan. Even his half brothers had met him only once, years ago when they played together as children.

But in the flurry of hugs, kisses and tears as thousands of Palestinian families continue to reunite here and in Jericho, Mohammad’s life and death do much to set the stage for this bold step toward peace. They also say much about the desperate land Israel has just set free.

Mohammad’s coffee shop appeared suddenly in December as a battered beacon of hope on Gaza’s grim landscape. He named it “The Goal Coffeehouse and Restaurant.”

It stood in an empty field, surrounded by Gaza City’s smoldering garbage and soiled sand. Mohammad was 26 when he opened the shop with Shawky; that was just 10 weeks before Mohammad became one of the last Palestinian casualties of Israeli occupation in Gaza.

On the surface, Mohammad and his open-air cafe stood as small symbols of Gaza’s irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit and uncanny capacity for survival.

He had bought a scrapped bus for $200, the last of his savings. It had been torched by angry Jewish settlers, who remain on the strip despite autonomy. He painted it. He banged out the dents, and it became his kitchen and service counter. He borrowed seats from one of the dozens of movie theaters that Israeli authorities shut down in Gaza six years ago after the uprising known as the intifada brought 8 p.m. curfews.

On Dec. 1, the cafe opened for business, selling falafel and other items for half a shekel each (about 15 cents).

“I was working in Israel making about 150 shekels a day in construction. When the Israelis sealed the border nine months ago, that was it. I sat around for months,” Mohammad said then in one of several visits with a reporter. “Finally, I had to open this place. We were going broke, and with nothing to do all day I was going crazy.”

He was one of tens of thousands of Gazan refugees whose families depended on jobs in Israel. They had become unemployed when the government, citing rising anti-Israeli violence, closed the border to most Palestinian workers in April last year. Overnight, Gaza’s unemployment rate soared from 20% to 60%.

After the closure, the Danaf family lived on Mohammad’s savings. For Mohammad, it was one more injustice that helped fuel a lifetime of hatred.

“I’ll tell you what I know of the Jews,” Mohammad said. “I know that since birth, when I was growing up, I remember asking where my father was. Everyone said the Jews forced him to flee our land. He left, they said, when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip. And that was the year I was born.”

Originally a refugee from the village of Hammama, one of dozens of Arab villages incorporated into Israel when the Jewish state was formed, Mohammad’s father had been one of the Palestinian soldiers who fought against the Israeli army in the 1967 war.

When Israel conquered Gaza that year, Hassan left with a Palestine Liberation Army brigade that went to Damascus, Syria; Aden, then-South Yemen; Beirut and finally Cairo, where it has served under the Egyptian armed forces. It was one of half a dozen such brigades that scattered throughout the Arab world. These units took over in Gaza and Jericho last week to form the core of the Palestinian security force--brigades that Hassan’s two sons from his second marriage would join after him.

Mohammad knew in December that his half brothers, Arafat and Sabar, were among the Palestinian fighters who would return to a homeland they never knew. He learned that news from his father, in the same way many Gazans kept up with relatives in Egypt after occupation. They would travel to the divided city of Rafah that straddles the Egyptian border in Gaza’s south and, at prearranged meetings, shout to each other through barbed wire across 30 yards.

Even at the time, Mohammad stressed the significance of this promised reunion--a small but powerful step in the reuniting of more than 2 million Palestinian relatives still separated by occupation and exile. It was, he said then, almost too good to be true.

“Even if we have self-government in only one small piece of Gaza, it will be better for us, of course. But I fear for the future,” he said. “I’d love to see the Palestine police force take control of this region, but I doubt it will happen.”

It did happen, but he didn’t see it.

Within weeks of its opening, Mohammad’s cafe was trashed. It happened during an armed clash with another Palestinian family over ownership of the land. Desperate, Mohammad illegally crossed into Israel and took back his old construction job. After two months, Israeli authorities caught him. He was deported.

“Mohammad came home about midnight on Feb. 24,” Shawky recalled. “He was angry and exhausted. When he woke up about noon the next day and heard what had happened that morning, something just snapped in him. He left the house in a fury. The next time we saw him, he was dead.”

That was the day in February when a Jewish settler opened fire inside a Hebron mosque, killing about 30 Palestinian worshipers and nearly destroying the autonomy plan for Gaza and Jericho. The killings touched off demonstrations and riots throughout the occupied lands. Mohammad joined one of them, outside the Israeli military camp near his home. He was shot in the right side of his chest. He died in the hospital.

As he sat outside the remains of the cafe last week, Shawky was in tears.

“Of course we will be happy when we finally see our two (half) brothers. But we are still in mourning for Mohammad, so there will be no celebration,” he said. “After a time, I will try to reopen this cafe. That was Mohammad’s dream. . . . But you must understand, we already have paid the full price of this peace.”

*

Arafat was haggard last week. His time in Iraq had aged his face far beyond his 19 years. And his eyes were wet as he reflected on the news of his half brother’s death. He sat inside the new Palestinian military camp in Jericho, which he and 450 fellow members of the Iraq-based Al Aqsa Palestinian brigade will use as a base to build a future Palestine. Shawky had just called.

“I met (Mohammad) just once, and we had fun together. I was 8 at the time,” Arafat said, recalling the one brief time Israeli officials allowed the other half of the Danaf family to visit. “There was something special about Mohammad, the way he saw things and the way he never gave up hope. He was the only one of the brothers in Gaza whose face I could remember.”

Then Arafat told the brief story of his life, and that of the other half of the Danaf family that lived as political nomads while Mohammad and Shawky’s family lived as subjects of occupation.

“Once, I went to the Egyptian Embassy in Baghdad to renew my passport,” Arafat said. “The man at the desk asked me where I was born. ‘Damascus,’ I said. ‘Why do you have an Egyptian passport?’ he asked. ‘My mother is Egyptian, and I grew up in Cairo,’ I said. ‘And where do you live now?’ he asked. ‘Baghdad,’ I said. The man just shrugged and said, ‘That’s nice.’

“This is what our lives are like, we Palestinians. I joined the Palestinian brigade when I was 14. There was no way to earn money on the streets of Cairo, and my brother (Sabar) had joined and said the pay was good--$62 a week. And yes, I suppose we did have the feeling we were doing something for Palestine.”

But for both boys, the decision would isolate them from their family for years. Iraq invaded Kuwait soon after Arafat arrived in Baghdad and Sabar in Tripoli, and in the following months alliances shifted sharply in the Arab world. For many analysts, that invasion and the ensuing Gulf War forced the peace process ahead.

When the subject turned to politics, Arafat had far less to say than his half brothers. His father, who has decided to remain in Cairo for now to raise his two daughters, spoke occasionally about Gaza and the occupation, Arafat said. It was only in Iraq that Arafat was lectured each week on the origins and implications of the conflict.

“What I can tell you is I really do believe this new peace is a great thing,” Arafat said. “I never believed it myself until I put my foot on the soil of Jericho. And soon, . . . I will see Gaza again. I want so much to see the sea of Gaza, to know that I really do have a home.

“But that’s not the most important thing right now. The first thing I am going to do is go to the grave of my brother Mohammad.”

*

Shawky stood beside that grave as he awaited the arrival of his half brothers last week. He stared at the inscription from the Koran that read, “Do not think he who was killed fighting for God is dead. They are alive and living in paradise.”

“We are proud of him,” Shawky said. “All of us will die one day, and we would like to die as he died. We miss him, but he is still in our hearts. . . .

“Many times, we imagine he is coming to us in our dreams, speaking with us about his feelings. And when our half brothers finally do arrive, and we sit finally altogether as all families should, I believe he will be there with us to enjoy the moment he dreamed of for so long.”