RAFAH (Gaza Strip): This dirt-poor Palestinian town on the southern edge of Israeli occupation has long felt isolated. But Rafah is now being cut further by an Israeli security wall going up amid little protest.

Drawing scant outside attention compared to a similar barrier in the West Bank, the planned seven-kilometre barricade snaking through Rafah’s centre is triggering new anguish in an already desperate border community.

And many here feel the spiral of poverty and helplessness in Rafah could be a harbinger of the fate awaiting the West Bank if Israel completes the barrier project there that has drawn widespread international criticism.

“There is no difference between the two walls. This one is also a way for Israel to weaken us and seize our land metre by metre,” Rafah resident Mustafa Jaber said as he surveyed the rusty iron barrier.

Since the start of the Palestinian “intifada” or uprising almost three years ago, the Israeli army has been creating a buffer zone on the Palestinian side of the border with Egypt which is under Israeli control.

Humanitarian groups say more than 900 homes have been destroyed. The Israeli army is now using rusty iron panels to build an eight-metre wall down the middle of a 100-metre-wide strip of no man’s land.

“Our politicians are ignoring this wall because they feel it won’t drastically affect the borders of a future Palestinian state,” said Jaber, whose house used to be in the heart of old Rafah but is now on the frontline of the ever-advancing border.

The fence Israel started erecting to prevent infiltrations by militants from the West Bank veers deep into the territory at several points, clipping huge swathes of fertile land and cutting off Palestinian villages and towns from their future state.

The people of Rafah know the feeling well.

“As always in Rafah, we are isolated, physically and politically,” said the 20-year-old Jaber, who was hit in the back four months ago by a bullet fired by Israeli soldiers while sitting in his living room.

The International Solidarity Movement, which has been spearheading the campaign against the West Bank fence, is the only group of outside volunteers to have maintained a presence in this flashpoint town.

“Rafah has been very effectively isolated, first with the Israeli border, the checkpoints and the settlements and now the wall as the last side of the prison,” said ISM activist Laura Gordon.

The Israeli army argues that militants use the houses near the frontier to prepare and launch attacks against its border positions and as entrances for tunnels through which arms are allegedly smuggled from Egypt.

But Gordon says the wall’s main design is “to perpetuate divisions in the region ... and make peace infinitely more difficult through the lack of contact between neighbouring peoples.

“There is a feeling that the desperate situation prevailing here is what could be awaiting parts of the West Bank,” she says.

Salaheddin Street used to be one of the busiest thoroughfares in Rafah, running right through the border where divided families could at least see each other and talk.

“Now the street is a dead end, much like everybody’s life here,” said Abu Samir Qeshta, 72.

The row of houses battered by almost nightly Israeli gunfire from the border gets shorter each month and the mirador looking down Salaheddin has turned the street into a dusty ghost alley where people fear to tread.

“Look at this place, a deserted neighbourhood of homeless, jobless people,” said Abu Samir.

“What is happening now to us is what will happen to the people of Qalqilya,” he added, in reference to the town which the other wall has isolated from the rest of the West Bank and severed from acres of farmland.

While Israeli bulldozers have been active on the southern fringe of Rafah since the start of the uprising, the army only started building the wall this year.

The pace of the construction work has been irregular and so far around two out of seven kilometres have been completed.

“I used to be able to see my family on the other side. But this wall has cut Rafah in two, our land and our houses in two,” said Abu Samir.

“It has cut me in two. I call on the president and the government to do something for us because we are being abandoned.”

Since his house was demolished by the army in 2002, the only belongings of the old man are a crutch and a walking stick.

He draws a circle on the ground with his stick and plants it in the sand: “I will stay here right here, whatever happens. This is the only form of resistance we have left.”

For Palestinians like Abu Samir, the debate over a right of return of refugees to their old homes in Israel is academic: “For the moment we are fighting not to be expelled again.”—AFP