BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip, 17 February 2006 — It was just before 2:30 a.m. when the Israeli F-16 came screaming out of the darkness. Salah Shawwa, a 72-year-old retired farmer, said he knew precisely because he was lingering late over a Danielle Steele novel, feeling guilty for not switching off the light.
It prepared him for when the first missile hit the bridge outside his front gate. Shawwa dived out of bed and ran for the hall. The shockwave from the second rocket sent a hail of rubble tumbling onto the bed he had just fled. The third and fourth volleys busted through his bedroom wall and brought down the roof and rafters, he said.
“They claim since the Israeli withdrawal that Gaza has become free,” Shawwa said the other day, sitting on a plastic chair in the yard outside the ruins of his house. “(But) they have been bombarding us like this day and night.”
The Israeli decision to shut down Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip last summer was a milestone that virtually ended a 38-year occupation of this densely populated finger of farming villages and slums on the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet in the past few weeks, it has become all too clear that the fighting is far from over and that Israel is not entirely disengaged.
More than 300 artillery shells have rained over the northern Gaza Strip in the past week in what Israeli Army commanders describe as an attempt to clear a buffer zone, which is needed to halt the increasing rocket attacks by Palestinian militants on Israel.
The Israeli operations have targeted Palestinians mounting attacks as well as objects like the bridge outside Shawwa’s house. Thirteen militants have been killed over the past two weeks, along with a 9-year-old girl who was shot by a sniper near the border after wandering away from her house at Khan Younis. A handful of other civilians have been wounded. The air strikes have been accompanied by sonic booms in the predawn hours, breaking windows and shattering nerves.
Border crossings also have been closed due to the continuing hostilities.
On Thursday (Feb. 9), an attack by two Palestinian militants armed with grenades, guns and explosives prompted the shutdown of the Erez border crossing into Israel. Thousands of Palestinians who use the crossing to go to their jobs in Israel were left stranded on the Gaza side of the border, where Israeli soldiers shot two militants dead. The closure came on the heels of a three-week shutdown of the main cargo crossing out of Gaza in January, an interruption that came at the height of the winter export season.
The move came after Israeli authorities found the beginnings of a makeshift tunnel adjacent to the busy Karni commercial crossing. Gaza farmers said being shut out of markets in Europe and the Arab Gulf cost them $20 million. “About 90 percent of the agriculture of this summer has been lost,” said Salah Abusamadhana, director general of the Economic Ministry in Gaza.
“Sometimes I think it would be better to have the settlers here,” he said. “Because they weren’t able to do things like this to them. Sonic booms at 3 a.m. Shelling. It’s the worst kind of terrorism, that’s all you can call it. What else do you call it but terrorism, when your children are kept awake all night long, terrified?”
“They are declaring unilaterally the new border of Israel,” said Shawwa, whose house was damaged by a missile attack on a nearby bridge. “They open the border, they close the border. They permit, and they withdraw permission. No honorable man would accept this state of affairs for long.”
In the end, many Palestinians say, the Israeli withdrawal did little or nothing to remove the grip from the 1.3 million Gazans on this narrow, sandy spit. The area vacated by the former settlements in the north is a nighttime killing zone, they say, and a newly reopened border crossing into Egypt imposes formidable restrictions on young Palestinian men seeking to leave.
“With this disengagement, Israel has put Gaza in a bigger prison,” said Issam Younis, director of the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights. “You know, the main manifestation of the occupation since 1967 has been the restrictions on movement. Talking about the era before the intifada, the occupation was on the checkpoints, on the borders, control of the entrance and exit of Palestinians and their goods. And you see, they still have full control over this movement, and over the borders,” he said.
“That’s what makes this disengagement not a political process; it’s a pure strategic Israeli security plan,” he said.
“Personally, I don’t feel any change whatsoever in this area since the withdrawal,” said the younger Zaneen. As he spoke, the doors and windows in his house rattled from the explosions outside. He and his father exchanged nervous glances. “Basically, the war has started all over again.”
