UM EL-NASSER, Gaza Strip -- On the sandy hillside at the edge of this village, Palestinian children tumble and slide in the billowing dust beneath a camouflage-draped Israeli army post that guards three nearby Jewish settlements. "Every time our children play along that road, we worry," said Ali Abu Klaik, 50, who raised 14 children here and saw a 15th die. Once the Israelis "are all gone, God willing, this place will be better."
From this battered town at the northern end of the Gaza Strip to a wind-blown refugee camp 24 miles away on the Egyptian border, the 1.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza have started imagining a different life after years in the shadow of Jewish settlements and the Israeli military installations built to guard them.
Starting Monday, the Israeli military is scheduled to evacuate 8,500 Jewish settlers from Gaza and dismantle those installations. After the evacuation, Palestinians will be able to move freely up and down the narrow strip and along dirt streets of villages like this one, hemmed in for years by fences and fear.
In interviews conducted recently along the length of Gaza, many Palestinians expressed hope that choices long determined by permits, curfews and road closures will soon be theirs to make. Access to hospitals and schools, jobs and markets, family and friends in Gaza will expand as Israel, which now occupies 20 percent of the strip's land, departs.
"I'm sure everything is going to change: social life, the economy, security," said Wasfi Abrak, 33, a police officer who commutes from his cement-block home here to Gaza City when curfews permit. "For the better."
Israeli officials say their own future, particularly regarding security in the cities of southern Israel, will be determined in large part by the extent of that change.
"It is in our best interest to see the people of Gaza enjoy a better life, and our relations cannot just be based on power," Shimon Peres, Israel's deputy prime minister, said in a recent interview. "What must be done immediately is to remove the obstacles, the roadblocks inside Gaza. Everything depends on freedom of movement."
In a speech Tuesday before a special session of the Palestinian parliament in Gaza City, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, urged Gaza residents to refrain from attacks and ostentatious celebration during the evacuation. Doing so, he said, would "show the world we deserve our freedom and independence."
But the sense of personal loss felt by people such as Abu Klaik will not soon disappear, and it is infusing the final days of the Israeli presence with a measure of bitterness.
Following Palestinian rocket attacks that killed two children in the Israeli town of Sderot, just outside Gaza, Israel's Operation Days of Penitence blew through northern Gaza in October. Abu Klaik said his 4-year-old daughter, Asma, lost consciousness in his courtyard after choking on tear gas thick in the streets. She could not be revived at a nearby hospital by the time he reached it through the fighting, he said.
"It was a different situation when my daughter was killed," Abu Klaik said from the same, now-quiet courtyard. "But we still want them to leave."
An End to Curfews
Most of the 5,000 people who live in this grid of cement shacks squeezed between sewage ponds and the settlements are from families that arrived in Gaza during the 1948 war that followed Israel's creation. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, established after the war, provides education, health care and social services for nearly a million registered refugees in the strip.
