Under Pressure, Palestinian Territories Pull Apart

In a meeting hall one recent morning, four Gaza lawmakers chatted with four legislators from the West Bank by videoconference -- the weekly meeting of parliament's economics committee. "I can assure you we are one geography and one people," Bahar said. "With one culture and one enemy."

Radicalized in Gaza

Many in the West Bank have viewed the fighting here in Gaza with disdain. Gaza residents such as Amr Hamad, the vice secretary general of the Palestinian Federation of Industries who returned five years ago from a U.N. post in Milan, say it is a sign of growing differences.

"We are becoming more aggressive as a people here," said Hamad, 33, whose wife's family lives in the West Bank. "At least Gaza has the beach, which could one day generate tourism. But first we need a change in mentality here. People still think women must walk around covered, and that is getting stronger. The only solution is to let people get out and communicate with other societies."

While overall Palestinian unemployment is at roughly 26 percent, nearly half of Gaza's population is without work. Those who have jobs with the practically bankrupt Palestinian government -- a far higher percentage of Gaza's workforce than the West Bank's -- have not received a full salary in a year.

About 5,000 Gazans had relatively lucrative jobs in Israel on the eve of its departure from the strip. That number has been cut to almost zero since Hamas took power, while 40,100 West Bank residents have permits to work in Israel's restaurants, vegetable fields and construction sites.

Gaza's export industries have also lost a higher proportion of jobs than the West Bank, because of Israel's frequent closure of the cargo crossing at Karni, which last year was shut entirely or partially for 129 days. Palestinian trade officials say 40 Gaza export businesses, mostly in the garment and furniture sectors, have folded since Israel's withdrawal.

The plummeting incomes in Gaza have increased pressure on Palestinian officials to break the 13-year-old customs agreement that binds their two territories in a single economy.

"Every piece of literature on how to fight terrorism mentions improving the economy," said Samir Hulileh, a former Palestinian negotiator who heads the Ramallah office of the Portland Trust, an economic development program funded by a private British foundation. "And Israel is doing the opposite."

In its 2006 annual report, Shin Bet noted that "terrorist infrastructures" in the West Bank "were increasingly guided and directed by elements in the Gaza Strip," citing the transfer of money, operational advice and "know-how on upgrading war materiel production, including rockets."

Diskin, Shin Bet's director, said Hamas has sent "tens" of its Gaza members to Iran for military training, with the "promise of hundreds" more. He said the training poses a grave threat to Israel because it can be shared across the territories.

Mahmoud and Ahmed Melow al-Ein are the oldest of five brothers raised in a neighborhood of concrete-block apartment buildings where on a recent afternoon, girls played in the streets in the head-to-toe cloaks favored by pious Muslim women.

Mahmoud, a 33-year-old construction contractor with bright eyes and retreating hair, still sleeps in their boyhood house in Rafah within sight of the Israeli-built wall marking the Egyptian border. Ahmed, 31, a policeman with a fleshy face and a head of gray stubble, lives in the West Bank town of Katana, in the shadow of Israel's separation barrier.

Prohibited from traveling between the regions, they have not seen each other in more than six years.

"We blame the Israelis, and the Israelis blame our uprising," said Mahmoud, who worked in Tel Aviv hotels before losing his work permit when Israel left Gaza. Over the years, the brothers, who once shared a room and long afternoons of soccer on the nearby beach, have missed each other's weddings and the births of their children. When their father died in 2002, Ahmed was absent from the funeral procession.

"The political situation exists now with no solution," Mahmoud said. "They will never be one state."