As Armed Groups Continue Rocket Strikes, Palestinians Grow Weary; Farmer Fells an Orchard After Mother Is Killed
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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.
Hamas pledged intensified violence against Israel. Rocket attacks surged to dozens on some days. Early this month, Hamas renewed suicide attacks in Israel for the first time since 2004, asserting responsibility for a bombing that killed a 73-year-old Israeli woman. The violence has overshadowed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks promoted by the Bush administration.
In a closed courtyard in Beit Hanoun, dozens of men gathered on a recent morning to welcome home a farmer who they said had been newly freed by Hamas after a week of interrogation. Gaza long has been divided by factional rivalries, and Hamas, like Fatah, uses payments and favors to cement the loyalty of its supporters. As pressure increases on Gaza, residents say that Hamas is cracking down harder on supporters of Fatah. One of the farmers at the gathering in Beit Hanoun, a place of mixed support for Fatah and Hamas, described Hamas security members chasing a local farmer, and firing wildly, on suspicion the man had been taking cash from Fatah.
Asked what they wanted for Gaza, one of the farmers asked first that he not be identified for fear of reprisals. Then he replied that he wanted the borders of Gaza to be reopened and the economy to recover.
The man added a third hope, his mouth twisting into a smile that held no amusement: "And for Hamas to roast on a hot grill."
When the rocket attacks increased last month, Israel intensified a policy of restricting shipments of food, fuel and other goods into Gaza, saying it would allow the minimum needed to avoid a humanitarian crisis. Israeli officials said they wanted Gaza's people to pressure Hamas to stop the attacks.
The Israeli campaign has had mixed results. On Jan. 23, gunmen acting with at least the approval of Hamas knocked down miles of border walls separating Gaza from Egypt. This was tremendously popular among Gaza residents who were angry at the hardships of the Israeli blockade and elated that it had been broken. Even opponents of Hamas's rule shouted thanks as they streamed through the breaches into Egypt.
By mid-February, the walls were back up, guarded by Egyptian border forces. Gaza returned to its midwinter dreariness. Donkeys ate out of trash bins by the Mediterranean Sea. With gas stations out of fuel under the Israeli restrictions, donkey carts hauled some of the motorbikes that Gaza residents had snapped up in their Egyptian shopping spree.
The 11-day border break seemed in some ways to have made life harder in Gaza, where 40 percent of the people are unemployed, and 80 percent depend on international food aid. Gaza residents collectively depleted millions of dollars in savings in Egypt, selling jewelry, even houses, for cash to buy goods.
As the border was closing earlier this month, a Gaza woman sat next to an entrance on gunny sacks bulging with laundry powder. The woman said she had borrowed more than $1,000 from relatives to buy the soap. It was all for her, she insisted. "It's dirty in Gaza," she said.
In Gaza City, merchant Issam Zaqot sold his car to buy computer parts and cellphone accessories. Last weekend, he sat in a Gaza City cafe, smoking water pipes with competitors who had sunk their savings into the same venture.
After the cross-border shopping frenzy, no one in Gaza had any money left to buy, the vendors said. And on that day and many others, Gaza City had no electricity to run the computers or power the cellphones. "We don't know what we're going to sell," said one of the men at the cafe, Ibrahim Qassas.
Asked who was to blame for Gaza's troubles, Qassas hesitated. The men at other tables fell silent to listen and a colleague who supported Hamas waited for a chance to interrupt. Israel was foremost to blame, Qassas finally said.
He changed the subject, then finished his answer only reluctantly. Hamas "should take care of the people's interests, not just fire rockets," he concluded.
Elsewhere in Gaza City, 38-year-old widow Najah Ahmer and her children huddled in their coats in an unlit, unheated tenement, decorated only by the funeral posters of her husband, brother and 13-year-old son.
Ahmer had allowed her bored son to go with the men on an errand in mid-January, although she had feared for her child in particular, she said. As the three drove in Gaza City, an Israeli missile struck their car, killing all three.
Israeli officials have acknowledged hitting the wrong car, saying the missile was meant for Islamic Jihad members in a vehicle near that of the family.
In one go, the strike deprived Ahmer's family of its breadwinners. Sitting in the dark, Ahmer posed a question for the combatants. "What do we have to do with this?" she asked. "We're not the resistance."
In a Palestinian government building taken over by Hamas, an official talked of using Gaza's civilians to make an impact on the other side.
After the "moral victory" of the destruction of the border wall with Egypt, Hamas now is considering sending Palestinian women and children to the border walls with Israel to demand their opening, said Ahmed Youssef, an adviser to the Hamas foreign ministry.
He shrugged at the risk. "We're taking our kids, they will join us. Let them kill them," Youssef said, wearing a rumpled business shirt and tie at his desk.
Youssef said the rocket attacks were worth the toll on the people of Gaza.
"It's a way to defend ourselves," Youssef said. "Instead of waiting here to die, it's a way to defend ourselves."
The Hamas official acknowledged one recourse that the ordinary people of Gaza lack: When lights go out during a dinner party with foreign guests, Youssef said, he can call the Gaza power company to have them turned back on.
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