RAFAH: Ehab Abu Taha is offended when I ask if he throws bombs at the Israelis. Undernourished and chain-smoking, he looks 16. He tells me he is actually 23. It is not the idea that he might attack Israeli soldiers that bothers him, it’s the fact that in the refugee camps of Rafah, the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, hurling homemade grenades is something that ‘kids do’, not teenagers, and certainly not adults. Ehab calls over a local child returning from one of the UN camp schools. He is a boy of about 10. He says he has thrown bombs four times at the Israelis. When we ask to see one of the crude steel pipes, he disappears and returns five minutes later with one hidden in his purple rucksack.

It is a rusty tube, welded at both ends and drilled with a hole to take a rudimentary fuse. A device this size, says Ehab, costs 7 shekels (about $1.50). The best ones cost $2.5. It is a lot of money in a place where families struggle to raise the $110 a month they need to rent a house away from the danger of the front line, where every home is vulnerable to bullets and tank shells. So the boys scavenge for scraps of metal they can sell, under the sights of the Israeli guns, or run messages for the gunmen.

Their game with the pipe bombs goes like this: at night they creep into the wrecked buildings on the front line close to the Egyptian border and into the no-man’s land beyond. When they are close enough to the Israeli patrols, or the watchtowers that overlook the camp, the petrol-soaked fuse is lit with a cigarette. When it is almost burned down, they toss the cylinder. The timing is crucial and difficult to judge. Unlucky ones can lose a hand.

Like Ehab, everyone I talk to insists that throwing bombs is a child’s game: they make an impressive bang, but do little harm. The Israelis don’t often bother firing back at the kids who throw them. It allows the kids trapped in the camp to let off steam, says one local father. The Israelis paint it differently. When it is reported on Israel Army Radio, it is called a ‘terrorist’ attack.

There are other dangerous games these children play. The Israeli Army believes the Palestinian militants use children to spy on their positions and test settlement security fences to search out weak points. The army has accused them of attacking Israeli soldiers to lure them into ambushes. What the young boys of Rafah tell me hints that some of this is true.

Throwing bombs is an initiation into Gaza’s violent adult world: of Hamas and Islamic jihad, and of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. Last month, not far from Rafah, one of the sorties reached its frightening conclusion. Two boys, armed with knives, the youngest just 13, were shot as they infiltrated the settlement at Netzarim in the north of the Gaza Strip. It drew widespread attention, even from an Israeli media accustomed to violence. What has happened, asked Israeli commentators, that even Palestinian children are now attacking us?

In Rafah, the answer is that activities like bombing have become a rite of passage. In the 28 months of the al-Aqsa intifada, Rafah’s jumble of camps and scruffy lanes have been transformed into a Mad Max world of bullet-perforated buildings and shattered neighbourhoods, patrolled at their edges by Israeli tanks and personnel carriers. It is a place where the normal routines of childhood struggle to survive against the ever-present evidence of destruction and death.

Headscarved girls walk home from school beneath Israeli observation towers, past walls painted with huge murals of dead Palestinian fighters. Eight-year-olds ferret in the rubble, oblivious to warning shots from Israeli Jeeps. Toddlers, led by their parents, play peek-a-boo with the stationary tanks from behind their father’s legs. In the lanes, the youngest children swarm about the armed Palestinian policemen, out of sight of the Israeli snipers, as they smoke their cigarettes.

What is most shocking to outsiders is the physical domination of Rafah by the Israeli army. Their guns point down every street and alley from metal-clad watchtowers, dividing the city into an invisible grid of high-voltage channels of danger that every resident, both child and adult, knows by instinct to avoid or cross at a quicker pace.

And it is along the city’s southern-most edge, among the camps, that this domination is most striking. It is here the Israeli army has bulldozed its free-fire zone — 75 metres deep — through the houses closest to the Egyptian border. Along this wasteland, Israel’s soldiers are building a metal fence five metres high, and five metres deep, to prevent the digging of tunnels that could be used to smuggle arms, goods and ammunition. Along this wall runs a line of observation posts bristling with guns.

If the fence to the south is solid steel, the barriers in every other direction are no less formidable. Blocking access to the Mediterranean sea and its long beaches are heavily fortified Israeli settlements that curl around the city like two enfolding arms, their perimeter roads patrolled by armoured Jeeps. Access to Rafah is by a single road controlled by the Israeli army. In the middle of all this are the recalcitrant residents of Rafah. Half are children under the age of 15.

The situation of Rafah’s children — say Unicef officials — is uniquely bad even in a conflict where the rate of child fatalities has doubled in the past year. At 70, the city — according to Palestinian health officials, who are not always the most reliable source — has the highest number of intifada child fatalities for any major town. What is in no doubt is that it has the highest rate of child participation in the intifada across all occupied areas.

It is commonplace for Israelis to blame Palestinian parents, institutions and Arab television for indoctrinating a new generation of ‘terrorists’. There is some truth in this. But it evades Israel’s responsibility in turning places such as Rafah into virtual prison camps whose social fabric is so eroded that the values of the gunman and the suicide bomber are replacing that of the family.

According to a survey by the Palestinian Ministry of Social Affairs — supported by Unicef, which accepts the figures — 75 per cent of the children in the occupied territories are suffering emotional problems from their experience of the conflict, with repeated exposure to the sound of shelling and shooting cited as the major cause of psychological damage.

As I walk around the poorest areas of the camps, closest to the front lines, I talk to parents. The stories they relate are consistent in their detail. Their younger children, they tell me, wet their beds, suffer nightmares, and try to hide from the sound of shooting. The older children are difficult and angry.

Psychologists have tracked this progression from terror to violence in the children of the camps. Among children up to the age of five, the fear is displayed as anxiety, crying, regression and speech disorders. Among children aged between 6 and 12 there is still fear and anxiety, but also aggression. But it is in the age group from 13-18 that the problems are most pronounced in rebellious and risk-taking behaviour that is combined with a sense of helplessness and withdrawal from the normal world.

I finish my visit at the cemetery. A couple of children are playing near one grave. When they see us, others come running among the plots to meet us. The wind carries a few spots of rain.

I notice a tiny fresh grave, piled high with sand. I learn from the boy that it is the grave of Hamid al Masry, a two-and-a-half year old who lived in Block J on the front line. Hamid had been shot trying to flee with his parents as Israelis troops fired on their area. His mother had been wounded in the stomach.

I had met his parents two days earlier. His father, Asad, had shown me the two certificates that he had been given to mark the killing of his child. I asked him about his six-year-old, Khalil, who had been leading Hamid by the hand when he was killed. How was he coping with his brother’s loss? “When he hears shooting, he runs into my arms. He talks about his brother and he talks about the Israelis. He says he is frightened of them, but he also hates them.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.