RAFAH (Gaza Strip): A bloodstained white scarf on a makeshift memorial of concrete bricks and a rusty grid is all that is left here of James Miller, a freelance cameraman killed by the Israeli army as he filmed a documentary about house demolitions in the Gaza Strip.

On May 2, the 35-year-old Briton was shot in the neck here, on the grim and ever-widening expanse of rubble separating the southern Gaza Strip from Egypt and splitting the city of Rafah in two.

An autopsy confirmed that Miller was killed by Israeli fire, after the army initially suggested he might have died from a shot from behind fired by Palestinian gunmen.

The spot where Miller fell lies in the area on which the 31-month-old conflict has left the most visible scars: a no-man’s land of rubble, uprooted trees and barbed wire.

Some 500 metres down the Israeli controlled-strip, lies the army’s infamous Termit outpost, around which gunfire hardly ever stops.

Running down the middle of the newly created buffer zone, the army has erected a massive concrete wall along the border and is continuing to shave off the edge of Rafah by destroying the houses deemed too close to the new security construction.

According to Palestinian sources, some 700 to 800 houses have been torn down in Rafah since the start of the intifada, and Israeli tanks zoom up and down the buffer zone day and night, relentlessly patrolling the flashpoint zone as the bulldozers continue their work.

Israel claims that the army has no alternative in its efforts to destroy tunnels allegedly used by Palestinian militants to smuggle weapons from Egypt.

Many impoverished families in Rafah’s border refugee camps have been made refugees two or three times over, and volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) are taking turns to sleep in threatened houses and act as human shields against further demolitions.

But their presence has irritated the army of late, and the pressure is mounting on them to leave Rafah. Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old US woman was crushed by an Israeli tank on March 16 as she was attempting to prevent a house demolition.

Her ISM colleague, Thomas Hurndall, a 21-year-old Briton, is still fighting for his life after being shot in the head on April 11 as he was trying to pull Palestinian children to safety.—AFP