Gazans Feeling Recoil of Attacks on Israel

As Armed Groups Continue Rocket Strikes, Palestinians Grow Weary; Farmer Fells an Orchard After Mother Is Killed

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip -- Mohammed Wahdan, a 20-year-old Palestinian farmer, waited until his mother's four-day funeral had ended, until the last mourner had left his family's crumbling farmhouse on the edge of the Gaza Strip.

Then he picked up an ax and walked out to the family's orange grove. The trees, then full of bright fruit, overlooked fields that rolled down to a cluster of white houses in the distance, their outlines fuzzy in the winter mist.

Hefting the ax, Wahdan sliced into the dozen or so orange trees, part of his family's livelihood, sending them to the ground, one by one.

Palestinian gunmen -- members of Hamas, the armed movement that controls Gaza, and other groups -- had used the cover offered by the orange grove to launch rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot, the white houses at the edge of Wahdan's fields.

When the fighters came one morning last month, the Wahdan family pleaded with them to think of the Israeli return fire that the rockets often drew. "There are women in the house, there are children," Wahdan recalled telling them. "You run away, but if the Israeli planes come, where do we go?"

But the gunmen went on as planned, the Wahdan family said. When the fighters came back that afternoon to launch rockets that had failed to fire the first time, Khadra, Mohammed's 54-year-old mother, was rolling dough in the kitchen. She ran out to shout at the fighters.

Khadra made it to the gate of the family courtyard when an Israeli shell hit. Shrapnel killed her and the family's 15-year-old hired farmhand.

"Her last words were, 'Go away,' " Mohammed Wahdan said.

Across Gaza, public weariness has grown alongside the mounting hardships caused by Hamas's conflict with Israel. Sealed from the rest of the world by the border barriers and checkpoints of its neighbors, Gaza is a gray, rubble-filled place where people trudge through the increasingly difficult business of daily life.

Last month, when Hamas called a march through Gaza City to protest Israeli economic restrictions on the Palestinian territory, officials resorted to putting Palestinian flags in the hands of young boys to bolster the ranks of their rally. Many Gazans, hurrying from shop to shop to stockpile goods, barely registered the rally, where Hamas men in austere black cloth coats towered over streams of roughhousing boys.

Since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in June, routing the Fatah movement that had been its partner in a Palestinian power-sharing government, Israel and Egypt have greatly restricted traffic in and out of the territory. Israel and the United States consider Hamas a terrorist movement.

Tension between Israel and Hamas spiked last month. On Jan. 15, Israel sent ground troops, tanks, helicopters and fighter jets to Gaza to push back the rocket crews, in the heaviest fighting in Gaza in a year. At least 19 people died, including the son of senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar.