KHAN YOUNIS: Palestinian grandmother Sabha Mkhaimar sits outside her bullet-pocked house, counting the days until Jewish settlers on the other side of the barbed wire leave Gaza. “I will beat a drum, sing and dance. We will slaughter a sheep for a feast,” Mkhaimar says, imagining an end to a cycle of Israeli army raids and attacks on settlers by militants in her refugee camp.
Israel’s planned evacuation of 8,500 settlers will be a huge relief for 1.3 million Palestinians in the cramped Gaza Strip, especially those in the Khan Younis and Rafah camps flanked and cut off from the sea by the largest Jewish bloc, Gush Katif.
Some camp residents cannot wait to replant their plots on land swallowed up by settlement growth in occupied territory.
Others look forward to regaining access to the Mediterranean for fishing, or just to relax on the splendid dune beach.
Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war. Settlers moved in over ensuing decades, sometimes next to Palestinian refugees uprooted from what is now Israel in its 1948 war with Arab states after declaring independence.
Israeli forces assigned to protect settlers razed swathes of cinder-block camp dwellings and other buildings they said harboured militants, and damaged many more with gunfire. Scores of Palestinians living in the midst of the conflict were killed.
Israel said it targeted only militants using built-up neighbourhoods as cover. Palestinians complained of collective punishment in Israel’s handling of their four-and-a-half-year revolt.
“One of my daughters was wounded by a bullet and another girl still suffers trauma from the raids,” said Mkhaimar, 60, several grandchildren at her side.
Two of her married sons left the house, where several generations of Mkhaimars live, for a rented shelter in a safer spot further inside the camp. A younger son’s plan to marry was put off until the settlers are gone.
“The first thing I do when they leave will be the wedding of my son. We will celebrate,” Mkhaimar said.
Gazing beyond the army watchtowers, tanks and barbed wire that shield settlements and hinder Palestinian movement around the territory, Palestinians see signs of change on the horizon.
In Rafah on Gaza’s border with Egypt, they said soldiers had taken down dozens of greenhouses in Morag settlement since a February ceasefire that has helped pave the way to the pullout, billed by Israel as ‘disengagement’ from the bloodshed.
“In the past they were putting up ever more greenhouses, not dismantling them,” said a donkey cart driver.
A special Palestinian Authority committee has been formed to verify people’s claims to land recovered from the Israelis.
Mohammad Thhair, 60, whose family owned the land on which the army base at Morag was built, said he had registered at the Palestinian Housing Ministry. The day Israelis leave, he plans to start preparing his field for planting.
“There were almond and olive trees there before the Israelis confiscated our fields in the 1970s,” said the father of 12.
“First the Ottoman Turks occupied our land, after them came the English, then the Egyptians and then the Jews. Finally the land will return to us. Our hope is greater now than before.”
In a narrow alley behind the rubble of dozens of houses in Khan Younis, 10-year-old Adel Sahloul played soccer with his friends out of sight of soldiers in watchtowers.
“For years we have been unable to reach the beach,” Adel said. “We play here for now because we are afraid. We cannot play opposite the settlement. They could shoot at us.”
Neighbours said two people were killed in the alley by random fire from soldiers before the ceasefire. Israel’s army denies any indiscriminate shooting into civilian areas.
Khan Younis militants showered Gush Katif with mortar fire last month after several Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank were killed by Israeli gunfire in disputed circumstances.
General calm was restored when Palestinian security men were deployed on Khan Younis’s fringes to restrain the mortar squads.
One Palestinian policeman at a new checkpoint said his house was demolished in an earlier Israeli incursion but he was determined to do his bit to keep the area quiet.
“My house was everything I had here. But as a security man I have to protect the ceasefire,” he said. “Calm is needed for the withdrawal to take place. It is more important than my house.”
The United States hopes the plan to withdraw from Gaza and a bit of the West Bank will revive a Middle East peace process aimed at a Palestinian state in the two territories.
Palestinian militant factions had been keen to show settlers ‘fleeing under fire’ before agreeing to the ceasefire at the behest of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas. Israel has warned that any serious new militant attacks would stall the pullout.—Reuters
