In Gaza, New Hamas-Dominated Council Attends to Basics

Forty miles south of the glass-walled, high-technology corridors of Tel Aviv, Beit Hanoun is a place with horse-drawn carts and donkeys in the streets. A town of low-rise concrete-block buildings and 32,000 residents in the northeastern corner of the Gaza Strip, it creeps to within a few hundred yards of the heavily patrolled and electronically monitored fence that separates Gaza from Israel. Few residents are permitted to leave the isolated confines of the 25-mile-long Mediterranean strip.

Few Palestinian towns have been more ravaged during the 4 1/2 -year uprising against Israel. Because of Beit Hanoun's proximity to the border, Hamas guerrillas and other Palestinian fighters used its outlying neighborhoods and fields as launching pads for the crude Qassam rockets they fired into nearby Israeli towns.

As a result, the Israeli military pummeled Beit Hanoun with tanks and helicopters during repeated incursions that killed at least 74 residents, destroyed or damaged 1,270 houses and bulldozed 1,875 acres of olive groves and other farmland, according to the mayor's office. City officials estimate that the conflict has cost Beit Hanoun $130 million, including revenue from agriculture and lost wages of residents who were barred from jobs inside Israel.

During the frequent sieges, Palestinians set fire to overflowing garbage bins in an effort to hide neighborhoods from Israel's U.S.-supplied AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships and pilotless drone aircraft. When Israeli troops entered the town, soldiers frequently shot out the streetlights, sometimes to allow more effective use of night-vision equipment and sometimes for target practice, according to accounts of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.

Israeli bulldozers and tanks chewed the main roads into chunks of asphalt and broken concrete. Palestinian fighters seeded some streets with booby traps and explosives and heaped piles of stones and debris at key intersections in an effort to impede advancing tanks.

Today the main road into town has been repaved. New aluminum pylons line the median strip, each topped by electric floodlights and the fluttering green flags of Hamas.

On a half-dozen streets, Palestinian workers are laying new asphalt where Israeli armored bulldozers ripped it up. Street sweepers work daily, whisking away garbage.

Some members of the ousted Fatah-dominated local government are bitter.

Ibrahim Hammad, 67, was mayor for the last nine years. He lives in a large multistory family apartment complex surrounded by fruit trees. He walks with a cane, and his black pinstriped suit seems to swallow his shrunken figure.

"I consider this real propaganda," Hammad said of claims by Hamas that it is responsible for improving city life. "During my tenure we did our best to help the community."

The former mayor said Hamas is claiming credit for international aid programs that were offered under his administration but could not be carried out because of Israeli military operations. He said the period of calm since the election of Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority in January has allowed Hamas to carry out many of those programs.

Hamas officials concede that cleaning streets, erecting streetlights and providing school bus service to marginalized communities addresses only a fraction of the city's ailments.