As Some Palestinians Try to Flee, Others Work to Resume Lives
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
GAZA CITY, June 19 -- At the Erez crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip, a man with a three-day growth of beard and bluejeans raised his fist and let out a hoarse scream amid the stench and desperation of the dozens of men, women and children who have been gathered here for days, unable to go forward, unwilling to go back.
"Let us die in Gaza instead of dying in this humiliation," he shouted. "Let us die with honor."
Um Mohammed did not move. Instead, she sat bundled in a head scarf in the intense afternoon heat. Like many of those around her, she first arrived here five days ago after Hamas's militia launched its final push to take control of Gaza. Bundling up her four children, Mohammed had fled Gaza for the crossing, hoping to return to her home in the West Bank city of Jericho.
Israel has kept this border passage closed, citing security concerns and a problem coordinating passage with Hamas, whose military conquest of Gaza has solidified the strip's political and cultural isolation from the West Bank. As a result of the closure, hundreds of Palestinians remained crammed Tuesday inside the 900-foot-long tunnel, living amid trash, human waste and the debris from recent looting that even stripped bare the crossing point's small mosque.
The walk through Erez on Tuesday provided a grim passage into a stretch of coastline utterly changed by Hamas's military rout of Fatah forces last week. The intensity of the Hamas campaign and the accounts of doctors, fighters and survivors who witnessed it suggest that a furious score-settling had taken place between the two largest Palestinian parties.
Evidence of the change was everywhere.
Bearded Hamas gunmen shouted "Welcome!" to visitors from checkpoints that were operated by Fatah-controlled forces last week. Elsewhere, victorious Hamas fighters tidied up the grounds of battered Fatah security posts, showing off now-empty cells where some of their leaders were held and allegedly tortured more than a decade ago.
Life appeared to be slowly returning to what passes for normal in the Gaza Strip, where 1.4 million people live along a narrow, resource-free coastline hemmed in by Israeli travel restrictions. Most Gazans -- including important members of the Hamas leadership -- are refugees or descendants of refugees from the war almost six decades ago that accompanied Israel's creation.
People filled this city's streets to stock up on food and medicine, fearing imminent shortages. Under a tangerine setting sun, scores of children swam in the Mediterranean, the beach dotted with colorful umbrellas and even a yellow Fatah banner. But it was the green Hamas flag that flew over military posts the group had taken over last week, replacing the red, black, white and green Palestinian national flag
"Smile," said Raji Sourani, 53, the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. "You are in Gaza."
Sourani, a quiet, balding lawyer, characterized the factional fighting that swept Gaza as "sad, bad, bloody, and extremely bitter." His organization placed the final death toll at 146 Palestinians, 36 of them civilians, including five children and eight women.
After investigating claims of executions, Sourani said three fighters were shot dead at point-blank range while recovering from wounds in Gaza's hospitals. Many other summary executions happened in the streets, he said, implicating both Hamas and Fatah gunmen.
After Hamas seized control in Gaza, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Hamas-led power-sharing government, through a decree Hamas officials said was illegal. The result has isolated Gaza from the larger and more populous West Bank.
The government ministries are running here, and Hamas leaders are busy giving the sense that their impasse with Abbas is temporary.
Fatah security services, led by the Preventive Security branch under Mohammed Dahlan, arrested scores of Hamas leaders in 1996 for opposing the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel that established the Palestinian Authority. Many Hamas officials have portrayed their final battle for Gaza as a narrowly focused strike against that element within Fatah that had persecuted them.
"We are not looking to establish a new state here, so we are not interested in international recognition," said Mohammed Madhoun, chief of staff to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister whom Abbas fired last week. "The issue of this fighting was simply to clean these institutions and buildings of these Fatah people who were calling our followers on the streets."
After a Hamas-issued ultimatum for Fatah forces to give up their guns expired Friday, Hamas fighters began going door-to-door seizing rifles and ammunition. The Hamas fighters have been working from lists seized in the security posts that show which Fatah officers were issued weapons.
"No one is happy with what happened, even some of us here," Madhoun said. "But we are collecting these guns now not for Hamas, but for the Palestinian Authority."
At Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, a group of doctors crowded into an office off the emergency room to talk about impending shortages. The larger issues of coordinating private cargo shipments with Hamas remain unresolved, but on Tuesday, Israel delivered 20 shipping containers of basic food products, such as cooking oil, and two others of medical supplies.
"Scalpels, some anesthetics, oxygen cylinders," one doctor listed.
"And there are no oxygen pumps for some of the critical patients," chimed in Ramsi Shaban, a 35-year-old neurosurgeon. "We've had some families pumping the oxygen to their wounded relatives by hand for two straight days."
"Each of these two governments we have now only care about themselves, like two brothers living in separate apartments," Shaban added.
Shaban and his colleagues worked round-the-clock shifts at Shifa through the fighting, and their wards became battlefields.
Hobbling into the office on crutches, Ismail Sadr, a 28-year-old emergency room doctor, recounted how he was shot in the foot by a Hamas gunman who had moved with about a dozen others into an operating room in the northern city of Beit Hanoun in search of a wounded Fatah fighter.
"Later, we found this other patient dead in his bed from bullet wounds he didn't arrive with," Sadr said.
Sadr said he could not get medical treatment for himself for several hours while Hamas gunmen surrounded Shifa Hospital.
"They put me in a car and took me to a mosque, where they put a hood on my head," Sadr said. "They beat me and said I was trying to evacuate Fatah fighters from the hospital. Finally, with some phone calls, I proved to them that I was only a doctor on duty at the time."
This city's high-rise apartment buildings became military objectives during the heavy urban fighting. Scorch marks from rocket-propelled grenades began on the eighth floor of one apartment complex near the Preventive Security headquarters, which Hamas took Thursday in a strategic and symbolic victory.
A Hamas gunmen named Abu Barah, 25, strolled through the battered buildings Tuesday afternoon. He said he was a member of the Izzadine al-Qassam Brigades and the Executive Forces, Hamas's military wing and security branch, respectively, which Abbas officially outlawed last week.
Some of the gunmen swept up debris from the buildings, their yellow walls riddled with bullets and rocket-propelled grenade fire. Other men prayed on small rugs in the dusty courtyard.
Entire stories of some buildings were scorched black. There was a burned-out bus on what had been Fatah's training grounds. Forms, documents, military pants and blood-drenched scraps of newspaper littered the complex.
"I think the people who fought here were very angry," Abu Barah said.
He walked down steps to a floor below ground level, and a line of cells stretched for 50 yards before him. He listed the names of several Hamas leaders, some of them dead, who had been held in the tiny rooms. On a hook outside one cell hung a black piece of cloth -- a blindfold he tried on for effect.
"I don't know what we will do with this place," Abu Barah said. "But there are many possibilities now."
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