November 25, 2003	Tuesday	Ramazan 29, 1424

RAFAH CAMP: Hussein Abdel-Al lost a home, then a son, to Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Then he found he was unable to pick up the pieces of his life.

The 60-year-old grocer returned from a temporary shelter to rebuild his house, only to see a towering iron security wall cutting through land where the building once stood.

Israel has built the barrier fringing the Rafah refugee camp along the Gaza Strip’s sandy desert border with Egypt to protect its forces from Palestinian militants and try to prevent arms smuggling into the territory.

“With this wall in place, our houses are gone forever,” said Abdel-Al as he stood by the eight-metre barrier where his home and those of his two brothers were demolished in an army incursion that Israel said targeted arms smugglers.

Israel is also building a huge electronic security fence inside the West Bank with the aim of keeping suicide bombers out of the country. Palestinians describe it as a land grab because the fence often diverges east of Israel’s border into occupied territory.

US President George W. Bush toughened his stance on the issue on a visit to London last week, saying Israel must not prejudice final peace negotiations with the Palestinians “with the placement of walls and fences.”

The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution last month condemning the barrier and demanding the project be halted.

The Rafah area is among the worst flashpoints of violence in a three-year Palestinian revolt in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israeli soldiers frequently fight militant gunmen while guarding the border and patrolling the vast, battered Rafah camp, crammed with 80,000 refugees and their descendants from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Troops also conduct search-and-destroy missions against tunnels under buildings in the camp. In the process, hundreds of Palestinian homes have been razed.

Abdel-Al denied having anything to do with militants. Rafah residents say dwellings without any link to tunnels or militants have been deliberately demolished as “collective punishment”.

Israel denies this.

ISRAELI RAID: In the latest of the Israeli raids, staged in mid-October, 15 Palestinians died in gun battles with the army, 120 homes were destroyed and about 1,000 people made homeless, according to UN relief agency figures.

Palestinian officials said Israeli forces had wrecked 1,200 homes in Rafah since the September 2000 start of the uprising.

Of these, more than 200 homes were bulldozed to make room for the security barrier that Israeli forces have gradually constructed over the past year, Palestinian officials say.

Palestinian Negotiations Minister Saeb Erekat condemned the barrier in Rafah, urging Washington to intervene to “stop the building of walls that hinder the materialisation of President Bush’s vision of a Palestinian state”.

Israel denies any homes were razed expressly to make room for the wall in a 100- to 200-metre-wide buffer zone created by Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt.

An Israeli military official acknowledged that Palestinian homes had been destroyed in the border area during raids to destroy tunnels used for arms smuggling or in response to Palestinian attacks, but could not provide any figures.

“The Palestinians in effect are the ones who turned this into a combat zone,” the official said.

Palestinians fear that continued construction of the wall will threaten more houses in the camp, said Omar an-Naqah, an official in Rafah’s governing council.

The Israeli army has plans to extend the barricade but they are on hold for financial reasons, the military official said.

Some of the refugees made homeless by Israeli raids, including Abdel-Al, have been resettled in UN-provided housing near the Jewish settlement of Atzmona in the south of the poor, desert territory.

A few months after his home was flattened, Abdel-Al lost one of his five children, Waleed, a 23-year-old member of Islamic Jihad who was killed in a gun battle with Israeli forces.

Another son, Khalil, 31, a father of four, also saw his home as well as three grocery stores he operated with his father crushed by Israeli armoured bulldozers.

Father and son now eke out a living selling sweets known as qatayef for Ramazan. “Things are very bad. Work is limited and security is lacking,” Khalil said.

The Rafah governorate of 150,000 people, including residents of the city proper, has a poverty rate of 75 per cent — people living on less than $2 a day, according to municipal estimates.

A beautiful Mediterranean beach stretches just west of the city but offers no escape for weary residents, for it is sealed off within the Jewish settlement of Rafiah Yam.—Reuters