SHAHTI REFUGEE CAMP (Gaza Strip): When Said Abu Aklen turns on the water tap at his home in one of the Gaza Strip’s most squalid refugee camps, only a thin, brackish trickle emerges.
Abu Aklen, a 46-year-old Palestinian father of nine, doesn’t expect that particular daily deprivation to ease any time soon — certainly not in the backdrop of Israel handing over Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, ending a 38-year military occupation.
“Will we be happy to see their soldiers leave? Of course,” he said reflectively, holding up a glass of cloudy, discoloured water. “Will it change the bitterness we drink every day? No.”
For the more than 1.3 million Palestinians crammed into Gaza’s tumbledown cities and sewage-fouled refugee camps, the end of the Israeli presence is at once a cause for celebration and a reminder of the bleak realities of life in this impoverished and overpopulated sliver of territory.
Some see the pullout as a fruit of the Palestinian uprising that erupted nearly five years ago. That is the view emphatically put forth by Hamas, a driving force behind the armed conflict with Israel and now a growing political power. In the Shahti camp, the militant group’s green banners flutter from walls and lampposts, bearing slogans such as ‘Who liberates Gaza establishes a state -– Hamas’.
But many Gazans take a far more cautious perspective, wondering whether the Israeli departure represents real liberation or merely will aggravate woes such as lawlessness, factional fighting, corruption and rampant unemployment.
“What’s happening here, the departure of the Israelis, is historic, of course,” said Gaza-based economist Salah Abdel Shafi. “But with all that, the potential for disappointment and disillusionment is very great as well.”
The Palestinian Authority has ambitious plans for developing the land that Israeli settlers vacated last month, which represents nearly one-fifth of Gaza’s 140 square miles.
The red-roofed homes where 8,500 Jewish settlers lived have been demolished, and Palestinian blueprints call for construction of a seaport, an industrial zone, a sprawling housing complex, a swath of parkland and, unlikely as it might sound, facilities for tourism.
In the past, large-scale development in Palestinian areas often has carried the taint of mismanagement, misspending and cronyism. This time, if the projects go ahead, Palestinian Authority officials are aware they will face intense scrutiny from foreign donors as well as domestic critics.
Hamas, the Palestinian Authority’s principal rival, has sought to highlight the corruption issue, and probably will hammer away at it in coming months as the two sides duel for political dominance in Gaza.
Hamas believes that garnering even one-third of the votes in parliamentary elections in January would guarantee it cabinet seats in President Mahmoud Abbas’ government, and thus give the group considerable leverage in long-term decision-making. At the same time, Hamas has made it bluntly clear to Abbas that it intends to retain its standing as an armed force beyond his control.
“The Palestinians are in a period of transition, perhaps the most crucial in their history,” said Yohanan Tzoref, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre, an Israeli think tank. “This is a transition not only between Israeli control and Palestinian control over the Gaza Strip, but between Yasser Arafat’s rule and that of his real successor.”
Throughout the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, militant groups fought Israeli troops and Jewish settlers in Gaza and lobbed crude rockets at Israeli towns and villages. But few suicide bombers who struck in Israel came from fenced-off Gaza; most entered through the more porous border along the West Bank. Still, because Gaza served as a nerve centre for Hamas and other militant organizations, Israel’s military often would respond to attacks with fierce operations in the seaside strip. Bullet-pocked buildings, vast expanses of land bulldozed to create shoot-on-sight zones around the settlements, and rows of demolished homes in cities including Rafah and Khan Yunis all bear testament to that.
Although Israeli troops no longer will be a daily presence in Gaza, Israel has indicated if militants continue using the area as a base for launching attacks, it could hit back even harder than during the intifada, with troop incursions or even artillery strikes that could kill or injure civilians near the site of a rocket launch.
“We have mortars, too,” the Israeli army chief of staff, Dan Halutz, told lawmakers early this month.
For Abbas and his government, the most pressing concern is an outbreak of unrest as the last Israeli troops departed on Monday.
Already, Palestinian security forces have at times been unable to hold back Gaza residents striving to get a close-up look at the settlements. Last week, Israeli troops killed two Palestinians who got too close.
Although the settlements for decades were islands of suburban comfort in the midst of some of the region’s most grinding poverty, Palestinian officials acknowledge that the communities’ emptying will bring about almost no immediate material gains for the strip’s restive population.
Israeli officials said they poured billions of dollars into Gaza’s infrastructure over the years of occupation, although much of it might have been ruined when the settlements were demolished. Palestinians hope to inherit at least the remnants of the settlements’ electricity and water grids, but their condition is unknown in wake of the demolition.
Palestinian officials also are worried that a sudden crush of demand on the shallow aquifer below what was the main settlement block of Gush Katif — which yielded the territory’s purest water — will lead to the same salt-water intrusion that has tainted much of Gaza’s supply.
“In so much of Gaza, you have water you cannot even use to brush your teeth. Back when more Palestinian workers had jobs in the settlements, they would be happy just to rinse their faces with water the settlers used for their crops,” said Ribhi Sheikh, the deputy head of the Palestinian water authority. “But however much we might wish it, there is not enough of a supply there to alleviate our problems.” —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service