Gaza Border Town an Icon of Palestinian Despair

Superimposed over a view of Jerusalem’s Old City, Yasser Arafat’s smiling face gazes out toward an unseen horizon from the billboard at the entrance to this border town. “My dream will never be completed without Jerusalem,” the Palestinian Authority president vows in the caption.

Twelve months of Israeli-Palestinian fighting have left the billboard shot full of holes, and left dreams in short supply across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Nowhere is the destruction more evident, the sense of loss and frustration deeper than in this town that straddles Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Rafah today has the look and feel of a war zone. Its strategic location has made it a key entry point for weapons smuggled from Egypt to Palestinian-controlled territory and a key battleground between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen.

The troops and Rafah’s many smugglers play a deadly cat-and-mouse game, the smugglers digging tunnels under the border fence, the troops finding and plugging them with concrete, and smugglers digging new tunnels in a seemingly endless cycle.

The struggle has turned neighborhoods along the fence into wastelands. Israeli tanks and bulldozers have smashed more than 160 homes and dozens of shops that lie within 100 yards of the fence, leaving hundreds of people homeless. No other Palestinian community has seen more of its buildings destroyed during the past year.

Most Have Slipped Below Poverty Line

Since last Sept. 28, the day then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon made a controversial visit to a site holy to both Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem’s Old City, more than 60 Rafans have died and thousands have been injured in gun battles that rage here almost daily. As the Israelis have tightened their blockade around the town, most of its residents have slipped below the poverty line.

Israeli troops on patrol and in heavily fortified lookout posts allowed under the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords have become prime targets. Every day, dozens of hand grenades are lobbed at the soldiers. Shooting attacks and roadside bombs are also common.

Hours before Arafat met Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on Wednesday at the nearby Gaza airport for long-delayed cease-fire talks, a bomb exploded in a tunnel dug under one of the outposts, almost knocking it over and injuring three soldiers. Thursday morning, Israeli tanks and bulldozers tried to thrust their way into Rafah’s large refugee camp, home to tens of thousands of Palestinians--and now their descendants--who fled here after the Jewish state was created in 1948. Gunmen opened fire on the troops, and four Palestinians were killed, 22 wounded, in the fighting that ensued.

Long before the uprising began, Rafah was a wild and hard-to-rule border town run by powerful Bedouin families who were often in conflict with the refugees. But in the last year, any semblance of Palestinian Authority governance has been erased by the gunmen who rule the town. They are proud to say they do not answer to Arafat and have no intention of laying down their weapons until Israel completely withdraws from the West Bank and Gaza.

By any objective measure, the intifada--which has claimed the lives of more than 600 Palestinians and nearly 180 Israelis--has pushed Palestinians further from their goal of achieving an independent state. But even here in Rafah, this hardest-hit of towns, most insist that they are not ready to abandon the struggle.

“Whoever said that the liberation of the homeland and the people can be achieved without sacrifice?” said Saad Mughari, a popular Rafah imam who is sympathetic to the militant Islamic movement Hamas.

There is little talk in Rafah of cutting losses and returning to negotiations, little patience for the cease-fire that the Bush administration is trying so hard to cement.

“Of course we’ve suffered--both sides have suffered a lot,” said Mustafa Shair, a 52-year-old farmer. “But if the occupation will end, the suffering will end, the confrontation will end.” Shair spoke as he and several family members sat beside the rubble of what once were their homes. Israeli bulldozers knocked down the extended family’s three apartment buildings and two houses on the night of Aug. 29, leaving 56 family members homeless.

“What can I tell you about hope?” Shair said. Beside him, his 80-year-old mother sat in the sand, a confused look on her face. The few belongings the family has scrounged from the wreckage--mattresses, clothes, pots and pans--lay in haphazard heaps nearby. “We say we are hoping,” Shair said, “but this is worse than what happened to us in 1948,” when the Jewish state was born and, along with it, the Palestinian refugee problem.

In several Rafah neighborhoods, clusters of white tents have sprung up to house the newly homeless. Capt. Assaf Librati, spokesman for the Israeli army’s southern command, said the army destroys homes only when they become outposts for Palestinian shooters or are used to hide entrances to tunnels.

“If there is no shooting there, no tunnels, there would be no reason to do that,” Librati said.

Under the 1993 Oslo peace accords that Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Librati said, Israel retained control of a narrow strip, just several yards deep, along Gaza’s border with Egypt. During the months of fighting, the army has gradually widened the strip and pushed the gunmen back.

Only one soldier has been killed on the border during the uprising, Librati said, but constant attacks make it one of the most dangerous places to serve. According to army figures, Palestinians have fired on troops there 285 times in the last year, thrown grenades 339 times and planted 30 roadside bombs.

As the fighting rages outside their homes, Rafans struggle to survive. Before the uprising, 4,000 Rafans worked inside Israel. Almost all of them have been jobless for a year now, as have 12,000 other Rafans who worked in small Gazan textile factories sewing clothes for Israeli companies. Troops often prevent farmers from tending their crops and block fishermen from going to sea. Smuggling, the army says, is now the main source of income for many families.

Of the 150,000 people who live in the town, its refugee camp and surrounding villages, 81% are living below the poverty line of $2 of income a day, according to Palestinian Authority statistics. Many say they subsist largely on food distributions from the United Nations and charitable organizations.

Before the uprising, said psychiatrist Mahfouz Othman, he saw “all the normal mental illnesses” at his Rafah clinic. Since the fighting began, he has dealt exclusively with trauma, depression and post-traumatic stress. He writes between 20 and 30 prescriptions a day for tranquilizers, more than twice the number he wrote before the violence erupted. Bed-wetting among children is on the rise, as is violence within families strained by financial problems and security fears.

“People say that we are strong, that we can take it,” he said. “But that is not the whole story. People are suffering here.” The community’s isolation from the rest of the Gaza Strip--there is only one road out and it is a gantlet of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks--has deepened the stress, he said.

“One of the groups I counsel are wives of taxi drivers. You can’t imagine how they are suffering,” Othman said. “They tell me they never know, when their husbands leave, if they will be coming back.” His patients include teachers, children, fighters, mothers and grandmothers.

“Some say that this uprising is a kind of catharsis, but we are a destroyed society,” Othman said. “There is complete destruction of our economic and social life.”

So what keeps Rafans going? For a 39-year-old gunman who asked to be called Nuradin, it is an abiding hatred for Israel and its superpower ally, the United States, and a grim determination that this fight will end only when the occupation does.

“Our major role is to convince the people to continue resistance to the occupation, to keep it strong,” said Nuradin, who helped found the Popular Resistance Committees that organize attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers in and around Rafah. Israeli intelligence sources say the committees are dominated by a single, powerful Rafah family that commands 200 fighters dedicated to battling both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

“The 10 years between Oslo and the intifada were unproductive years,” Nuradin said. Despite the losses Palestinian armed groups have endured in the last year, he said, “we are satisfied because we still exist, we are still defending Palestine, our people, our rights.”

Although the border neighborhoods have been hardest hit by the fighting, the destruction spreads across Rafah. A few dozen yards from the billboard at the town’s entrance, troops destroyed the offices of the Palestinian National Security Police’s southern Gaza headquarters. Not far from there, nervous Rafah police sit outside their bullet-pocked station in straight-backed chairs, sipping sweet coffee. Staying outside makes it easier, they say, to scatter in the event of a helicopter gunship attack or tank incursion.

Scarred Walls, Shattered Windows

Deeper into town, the buildings still standing have been scarred by bullets and cratered by tank shells. Most of the windows of the Noor Mosque have been shattered by shooting, and its facade is riddled with bullet holes. Few venture there to pray anymore.

Across the street from the mosque, the living room windows of the Hassan family’s home were blown out in gun battles months ago. The walls are pitted by the bullets that have whizzed by most nights for the last year.

Jamal Hassan, 41, made $30 a day as a construction worker in Israel before the revolt began. He hasn’t worked since Sept. 29, and has exhausted his savings. His 17-year-old son, Mustafa, recently took a job as a waiter, working from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m., seven days a week. He brings home $100 a month but falls asleep at his desk at school every day.

“We are less than poor now,” said Jamal Hassan’s wife, Mazeh, 35.

By not paying utility bills and eating mostly beans and lentils, the family is getting by, she said. With pride, she adds that her five older children frequently throw stones at the soldiers. She worries only about her youngest, 8-year-old Abdul Khader. He is so frightened by the shooting that he now flees to his grandfather’s home, farther from the border, whenever the battles begin.

For Mazeh Hassan, the suicide bombers who have killed dozens of Israelis are heroes. Eventually, she said, they will exact so great a price in civilian casualties that Israel will withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. “We have to be patient,” she said. “. . . It will take a few years, but we will keep going until they leave us and get out.”