In Rafah, ‘Nowhere to Run’

Sabrin Hissi, a young Palestinian mother of two, was outside her house Wednesday morning with a plastic bucket, trying to salvage precious water from a shattered irrigation pipe, when she heard the shriek of incoming artillery shells.

Snatching up 2-year-old Salah and 3-year-old Ines, she fled indoors, huddling with them in the family’s concrete-block bathroom as shrapnel punched gaping holes in the walls of the living room and back bedroom.

“I felt death was very close to me and to my children,” she said tearfully an hour after the midmorning barrage.

Battled-scarred Rafah, home to more than 100,000 people at Gaza’s southern tip, is the nearest city to the Israeli troops and armor that have dug in at the territory’s long-shuttered international airport. The troops are searching for an Israeli soldier believed to be held somewhere in the area.

Closest of all is Hissi’s remote neighborhood of Shoka -- Arabic for “thorn,” named for the scrubby cactus fields surrounding it -- which lies less than a mile from the newly established Israeli front lines.

Rafah took the early brunt of the Israeli offensive, the first such incursion since Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last summer. On Wednesday, Israeli missiles hit fields just outside the city.

“They always talk about aiming at open land,” said Ahmed Hissi, Sabrin’s father and the family patriarch. “But we live here!”

As Gazans waited Wednesday to see whether the Israeli ground offensive would be broadened to include urban areas such as Gaza City, the first full day of the military presence in the coastal strip became a war of nerves.

Israeli fighter jets repeatedly streaked low over the coastline, unleashing earsplitting sonic booms overnight and throughout the day. In the streets and shops, many people were bleary-eyed from lack of sleep.

Even before the incursion, life in Gaza was often miserable. The territory, home to 1.3 million Palestinians, is one of the most crowded places on Earth, deeply impoverished, mired in unemployment and largely cut off from the outside world.

With nearly three-quarters of a million people left without power by an Israeli strike overnight on the main electricity transformer, Gazans sat on stoops and sidewalks to try to catch a breeze, glancing skyward when Israeli aircraft circled overhead.

Across Gaza, people hurried to stock up on emergency supplies: bottled water, candles, foods that wouldn’t spoil when refrigerators stopped running.

The bustle in open-air markets and darkened shops lent an air of normality, one that was periodically darkened by the distant or not-so-distant boom of artillery.

In the Gaza City neighborhood of Shajaiya, a militant stronghold, masked Palestinian gunmen crouched in alleyways, some cradling rocket launchers. “If they dare to come here, we will fight them,” one said.

Most Palestinians, though, said they knew very well there was little chance of halting an all-out Israeli offensive in densely populated towns and refugee camps, something Israeli officials have said is a possibility if Palestinian militants do not free the soldier who was captured Sunday.

“What we have done here, this would not stop a battle tank for even one minute,” said 18-year-old Zakaria Kaluseh, pointing to a makeshift barricade erected by residents in the Jabaliya refugee camp, on Gaza City’s northern fringes.

“But it’s important to us to make some kind of resistance, even if it is only symbolic.”

In neighborhoods where Palestinian militants are known to live and operate, there was a clearer sense of menace. Israeli airstrikes aimed at stopping Palestinian rocket attacks have targeted guerrilla leaders and field commanders but also have killed more than a dozen bystanders in the last month.

In a refugee enclave known as Beach Camp, where Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh lives, residents stretched tarpaulins across narrow alleyways to impede the surveillance by airborne Israeli drones that often precedes airstrikes. “It is for our own protection as well,” said a young woman who gave her name only as Umm Ahmed, or “mother of Ahmed.”

Across Gaza, the spirit of improvisation prevailed, as it does so often in the territory where daily life often boils down to a series of logistical challenges.

On the main North-South road, where Israeli missiles collapsed a highway bridge into a gulch, motorists quickly carved a new roadway through the dry riverbed. Rattletrap cars and donkey carts made their way across the expanse, raising clouds of dust.

After the initial night of airstrikes, few Palestinians interviewed here blamed the militants who snatched the Israeli soldier, or the Hamas government elected early this year, for bringing such troubles literally down on their heads.

“We believe the Israelis would take any excuse to attack us,” said Mahmoud Magameh, a young shopkeeper.

And most were adamantly opposed to releasing the soldier without, in turn, winning the freedom of at least some of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

“My cousin, my neighbor, my friend from school, my father’s brother,” said Salam Sheer, a 32-year-old Rafah man, ticking off the list of relatives and acquaintances jailed in Israel.

“I would rather see my whole family killed than see us get nothing for this soldier,” he said.

In the areas closest to where the Israeli troops were deployed, many Palestinians said they wanted to flee their homes -- but were reluctant to impose on hard-pressed relatives elsewhere in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinian civil servants have gone unpaid, or received only a fraction of their salaries, since Hamas took power.

“Who can afford to feed another 20 people, even if they are your own kin?” said Sabrin Hissi, who said she wished to leave her shell-damaged home on Rafah’s outskirts.

“We would run away if we could. But there is nowhere to run.”