RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP (Gaza Strip): At first it seemed that the roughly 600 Palestinian refugees left homeless in the cold and rain by Israeli bulldozers were victims of revenge. But it is now becoming apparent that Palestinians like Jihad Ghassas, a young carpenter who lost his home, are victims of Israeli maps, obstacles to perceived security imperatives in an area where, according to Israeli commanders, troops are endangered and arms are smuggled.

Ghassas stood on Friday in the only room still intact in his house, now on the edge of the most recently expanded no man’s land in the Middle East. It stretches over a hundred yards deep into this refugee camp along Gaza’s border with Egypt, which has remained under Israeli control under interim peace agreements.

Israeli weapons fire, tanks, and bulldozers have steadily levelled all the houses that were in the no man’s land, culminating in Thursday’s mass destruction, which took down 58 buildings, according to UN statistics, the largest single demolition during 15 months of fighting.

Some 70 UN-supplied tents have sprouted on nearby streets. The same process has been under way elsewhere in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in areas close to Jewish settlements and army positions, according to international aid workers.

“The idea is to depopulate areas they see as zones they would like to control,” says Ann Kristin Brunborg, field director for the UN Association for International Service. Brunborg, author of a study last year for the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group on army shooting practices, says Israel has deliberately displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians through “systematic” gunfire at their neighbourhoods and destruction of their houses.

On Tuesday, Israeli security forces also destroyed several houses in the Arab neighbourhood of Al Isawiya in the eastern sector of Al Quds. A police spokesman said an Israeli court had issued destruction orders for 17 houses that were “built illegally,” the wires reported.

On Sunday, however, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Israel had decided to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. But Sharon reaffirmed the demolition policy on Tuesday in remarks quoted on Israel Radio. “We act in accordance with our security requirements, and that is the only thing that influences our decisions,” he said.

For Ghassas’ family, the entry of tanks and bulldozers was a fresh trauma layered on to his grandparents flight to Gaza from Asdud, a coastal village that was conquered by Jewish forces in 1948 and later transformed into the Israeli city of Ashdod. More than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes during the Arab-Israeli war that year, many of them taking refuge in Gaza.

Ghassas says the family had no warning, only the firing from tanks, and he scrambled to carry his brothers Mohammed, 3, and Saleh, 5, out of the house and to check that no one was left behind. Their possessions were destroyed. “My heart is black. For one or two years, the hate will build up inside the people,” he said. “And then there will be an explosion of revenge.”

Palestinian residents deny there were weapons smuggling tunnels around their homes. They confirmed that Palestinian fighters used the area to shoot at Israeli troops, but say Israeli soldiers fired into the area constantly, so that this was a type of self-defence. During the same period, 344 Palestinians have died at Israeli hands in Gaza, the overwhelming majority civilians, according to the Health, Development, Information, and Policy Institute in Ramallah. Brunborg, who stayed over in Rafah, Khan Yunis, and West Bank flashpoints a year ago for her report, said Israeli shooting was very intensive on the edges of Rafah and Khan Yunis, which has stretches that front the Katif bloc of Jewish settlements that have been levelled.

“It is done so systematically,” Bromberg says. “They would shell every night whether the Palestinians opened fire or not. Two, three, or four Palestinian gunmen would fire 15 rounds and run away. The army would fire the whole night, hour after hour and use tanks, automatic grenade launchers, and airburst shells. They would retaliate when shot at, but continue systematically when there was no threat to the lives of soldiers. If Palestinians opened fire at an Israeli outpost, three positions would open up at a neighbourhood kilometres away from the shooting. Some houses get so pockmarked they cannot stand anymore. The houses I stayed in at Khan Yunis and Rafah no longer exist.”

UN workers say the first such demolition in the part of Rafah that was targeted on Thursday took down 18 shelters, another operation in August levelled 29, and in October another 25 houses were destroyed. Khalil Matar, deputy director of the ministry, says that in addition to creating buffer zones, “this is a way of pressing on people. They work for years to build their house, and then it is destroyed. It also puts pressure on the authority.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote in an editorial that the demolitions in Rafah offer a lesson in the callousness of Sharon, Ben-Eliezer, and the army my Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz. “No Israeli can go along with this sort of blind cruelty,” it concluded.—Dawn/LATS Service (c) Christian Science Monitor.