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GAZA-EGYPT BORDER: From a watchtower on the Israeli army's line in the sand, the hottest spot in the four-year-old Palestinian revolt looks eerily calm for a moment. Israeli soldiers reduce the vast Rafah refugee camp to the crosshairs of telescopic surveillance cameras that make slow sweeps across its bullet-battered facades.
The monitors linger for a few seconds on a solitary old taxi creeping oddly through a demolished district. No sign of Palestinian militants, who are laying low after a pre-dawn Israeli missile strike.
But then they may be underneath the soldiers, digging tunnels for smuggling arms from Egypt. The tunnels under Rafah make the border camp a key proving ground in a test of strength between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants ahead of Israel's planned pullout from Gaza in 2005.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has written off Gaza, occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war, as a quagmire and wants 8,000 Jewish settlers out next year under his plan for "disengagement" from the Palestinians.
But Sharon intends to hold onto the corridor along Gaza's border with Egypt. Israeli officials say that will be at least until they think Cairo is able to halt smuggling to militants - many of them Islamists sworn to destroying Israel.
"If disengagement happens, we will take care to build up this line and hold it as well as we do now," said Colonel Shuki Rynski, commander of Israeli forces in Gaza's south, taking reporters on a rare tour of the border strip.
Rynski side stepped questions about army concerns that a unilateral withdrawal could "reward Palestinian terror". For keen to prove they chased out the Israelis, Gaza militants have been cranking up mortar and bomb attacks.
RAFAH ROLLED BACK: When Palestinians took up arms against Israel in 2000, Rafah sprawled to within a few metres of army positions along the Egyptian frontier. Israeli forces have rolled back Rafah in a big way since.
They have flattened hundreds of houses, leaving around 15,000 homeless and drawing international outrage, to carve out a buffer zone 100-150 metres wide and better ferret out tunnels being burrowed under their noses.
Israel intends to install remote-controlled machine guns on its ramparts facing Rafah and may dig an anti-tunnel trench through the zone that it dubs the "Philadelphi Corridor". "To that end, we have recommended to the Defence Ministry to widen the strip to 300 metres," Rynski said.
The corridor is marked by a partly built eight-metre sheet-iron wall, two watchtowers dubbed "Termite" and "Har-Don", several inner rows of barbed wire, and tanks perched on sand dunes with turrets trained on Rafah.
Soldiers point out Palestinian buildings protruding into the strip from which they say gunmen often target. One is the "White House", a tall abandoned housing block, another the "Pagoda", which resembles a Buddhist temple.
People in the packed camp of 80,000 have been caught up in almost daily clashes between Rafah militants and Israeli tanks and troops, often sparked by army raids in search of tunnels.
Hundreds have died, militants and civilians alike. Rafah alone accounts for 10 per cent of Palestinian casualties and has come to symbolize the suffering of civilians in the conflict. The Israeli army says it has unearthed more than 90 tunnels from Egypt, Gaza's only outlet to the Arab world, since 2000.
UNDERGROUND GAME: Rynski said militants were almost certainly digging more tunnels as he spoke, and ever deeper to dodge detection. Israeli officials believe the militants are trying to turn the tables in the conflict by adding heavy weapons, such as anti-tank missiles, to their armoury of assault rifles, grenade launchers, and crude, inaccurate mortars and rockets.
Military sources in Israel said Egyptian border police had been doing more of late to crack down on tunnels in response to Israeli complaints. "We have worked on this and we have stopped a lot of things," said an Egyptian official.
But the Israeli army sees a wider corridor and trench, which would be dug 15-25 metres deep close to Rafah's current line of housing, as critical to sealing the border. Rafah residents fear the cost would be more demolitions and homeless. Militants vow Israel will take no more land. -Reuters
