Gaza's Palestinians Poised For Life With Fewer Limits

Asked how he supported his wife and 10 children, Odeh Darwish smiled. "Kofi Annan," he said, referring to the U.N. secretary general and flashing a thumbs up.

For two decades, Darwish, 38, sold vegetables in the Israeli town of Rehovot. He made $46 a day, 10 times the wage for similar work in Gaza, until his permit expired two years ago during the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000. On the eve of the uprising, 30,000 Palestinians from Gaza worked in Israel; today, 4,000 do so.

Israeli and Palestinian officials are discussing how Gaza will be linked to the outside world, an issue essential to its economic viability. But matters of border control and connections to the West Bank have proven difficult to resolve, mainly because the withdrawal is designed to separate Israel from the Palestinians, who Israeli government officials say threaten Israel's security and the durability of its Jewish majority.

Darwish will have to look for ways to make a living inside the strip, where unemployment hovers near 60 percent. But his opportunities will grow once the settlements disappear, and with them the curfews that keep nearly everyone inside his village after dark. Night jobs in the hotels and restaurants of Beit Lahiya and Gaza City, long off limits, will soon become options.

"People will be able to work wherever they want," said Abrak, the police officer.

Freedom of Movement

The road south brushes the gray squalor of the Jabalya refugee camp before swinging west toward broad beaches and the sea. In the heady aftermath of the 1993 Oslo accords, a tourism industry was supposed to take root along the coast. A few hotels built at the time stand derelict along the bluffs.

A few miles south of Gaza City one recent day, the only road running the length of the strip was severed by three deep trenches, carved by Israeli army bulldozers the previous evening. The closure followed a Palestinian rocket attack that killed a 22-year-old Israeli woman in her home north of Gaza.

In a long, raucous procession, black-cloaked women, men in business suits carrying briefcases, and mothers with children stepped out of taxis on one side of the trenches and hopped onto horse-drawn carts on the other.

"Usually it takes 10 minutes to get there, but times like this it takes all day," said Rushdi Badawi, 57, a farmer traveling to his tomato patch on the Gaza border. "The Israelis will pull out because they are sick of it. They are disgusted with it, just like us."

The road turns east at the fence marking the border of Gush Katif, the largest bloc of Jewish settlements in the strip.

Perhaps nowhere will the end of the Israeli presence be felt more strongly than in Mawasi, a chain of Palestinian communities set along a fertile coastal strip inside the Gush Katif boundary. For years, its 8,300 farmers and fishermen have lived in a kind of no man's land, separated from the rest of Gaza by the checkpoints and fences in place to protect the settlements.

One recent morning, several dozen Palestinians sat on benches beneath a covered waiting area at the Tufah checkpoint between Mawasi and the city of Khan Younis. In the searing heat, a group of Palestinian men unloaded coils of hose, metal siding and concrete blocks from a truck on the far side of the checkpoint, carrying the material to a waiting flatbed on the Mawasi side.