To have and have not in Gaza

Palestinians in al-Mawasi queue in the heat while nearby Israelis dip in their pools.

Edward Pilkington in al-Mawasi, Wednesday 4 July 2001, The Guardian

Om Mohamed Zuorb has been queueing silently for more than an hour in the midday heat. She is trying to reach her home less than a mile away, but there is something in her way: an imposing pillbox covered in black netting and sandbanks and surrounded by concrete slabs which someone has painted pastel pink and blue in a vain attempt to make it look more friendly.

A couple of Israeli soldiers are inside - you can't see them but their voices boom out over loudspeakers directed at Mrs Zuorb and the about 20 or so other Palestinians waiting with her in the heat to pass the Tufah checkpoint.

"Stand back!" one shouts in Arabic. "Stand further back! Move, now, or none of you come in."

Mrs Zuorb, who has been shopping for clothes and food, shuffles a few yards away from the box. "There is no freedom," she says. "There is only fear."

Mrs Zuorb's home is in one of the most surreal parts of the surreal Middle East. The area is called al-Mawasi. Locals refer to it as "the jail within a jail".

Al-Mawasi is a tiny Palestinian and Bedouin community on the southern Mediterranean coast of Gaza.

During the 10 months of the intifada it has been doubly shut off from the outside world: Gaza has been almost totally sealed off from Israel proper, and al-Mawasi almost totally sealed off from the rest of Gaza.

Its ill luck is to be engulfed by a huge block of Israeli settlements, collectively known as Gush Katif, which have grown up around it since Israel occupied Gaza in 1967. Thirteen of Gaza's 19 settlements are located here.

To protect the settlers from potential Palestinian attacks the Israeli army has erected a ring of steel, making it very difficult to get in or out.

For the past seven months journalists have been barred entry by the Israeli authorities. But last week the Guardian was given a rare glimpse of the cost the double closure has imposed on the community's 5,000 residents.

As soon as you get beyond the pillbox, an anarchic strip of Bedouin tents and Palestinian houses comes into view. Only 500 metres inland, separated by a high wire fence, are the standard-issue red pitched roofs of Israeli settlements.

Running the length of the two communities are two roads - one for the Palestinians, one for the settlers. They are easily told apart: the Palestinian road is single lane, worn and used by beaten-up, rusting vans; the settlers' road is immaculate, dual-lane and carries new Japanese saloon cars and Israeli army Jeeps.

The Palestinian road leads to the door of Ahmed Mustafa el-Majaida, al-Mawasi's head man. Dressed in a mauve jellaba and embroidered skull cap, he flourishes his Israeli-issued identification card.

When they closed off al-Mawasi at the beginning of the intifada, all the residents were registered and given personal numbers without which they can neither leave nor enter. Mr Majaida's number is 183. "They make us feel like cows, branded with these numbers," he says.

The residents are allowed out only to go shopping in the neighbouring Khan Younis refugee camp between 7am and 7pm.

When they get to the pillbox they have to divide their purchases between three clear plastic bags for inspection.

The Israeli army says that tough security measures under the intifada are unfortunate but necessary because of al-Mawasi's peculiar location.

"Once a Palestinian enters the village there is nothing to stop him entering neighbouring settlements. That makes the area very dangerous," an army spokesman said.

Nowhere to bury dead

Even death has become problematic, because there is no cemetery in al-Mawasi. Mr Majaida tells the story of a local woman whose husband died. She tried to take his body in a car across the checkpoint but was told the vehicle could not go through. "She ended up carrying him in her arms across 200 yards of no-man's land."

A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up last month close to the pillbox, which local Palestinians now call martyrs' junction, seriously injuring an Israeli soldier. The intifada has also claimed a Gush Katif settler, shot by Palestinian gunmen.

Al-Mawasi's residents accept that some measure of security may be needed, but say the extent of the closure is causing deep economic hardship. The area is dependent on fishing and farming, yet the fishing boats lie idle in the sand.

For five months at the height of the intifada fishermen were forbidden to go to sea at all: the Israeli army said weapons were being smuggled into Gaza. The prohibition coincided with the main seasonal catch of sardines and tuna.

The fishermen, sitting on cushions of broken nets, ask not to be named in case it makes it even harder for them to get out of al-Mawasi. In the past few weeks the restrictions have been eased, allowing them to fish up to five miles from the shore. But it can take so long to get permission to take the catch to markets on the other side of the pillbox that it spoils in the heat.

The same story is told by the farmers. Beside the Palestinian road are fields full of ripe tomatoes hanging unpicked from wilted vines. Our driver says it has become so difficult to move produce out of al-Mawasi that many farmers have simply given up harvesting their crops.

The driver, Azir Abedla, was a farmer himself until four months ago. He had guava and citrus trees and fields lined with palm trees. Some of them, he says with pride, were older than the Israeli occupation of Gaza itself.

Then the army arrived with a bulldozer, leaving a flattened morass of dust and uprooted trees about 30 metres square.

The pump used for watering the land was destroyed and many of the underground irrigation pipes cut to shreds. Without them, the earth is turning to desert.

"Now I have nothing." He points to the pile of loose coins on the dashboard he has earned from taxi driving. "That's what I live on now."

A spokesman for the Israeli army said farmland was only bulldozed after repeated Palestinian attacks.

"We don't want to see any civilian suffering. Most Palestinians aren't involved in violence and we respect that. But attacks on the army put us in a difficult position."

Who does Mr Abedla blame for what has happened to his farm? "From my point of view I just want to live peacefully. I do not understand the intifada. Nor do I understand the occupation."

His bulldozed fields are flanked by the neatly tarmacked settlers' road, which runs down to the sea. It passes a settlers' resthouse which offers canoeing and horse-riding, and leads to the Palm Beach hotel, which is about to reopen for the summer season and boasts floodlit tennis, a children's playground and crazy golf.

Just opposite Mr Abedla's destroyed land there is a half-size swimming pool in which the women and children of the settlement are bathing. It is run by Moshe Viss, a Romanian-born Israeli who has lived in the settlement for 12 years.

"This is a good life," he says. "You want beach, it's here. You want a pool, it's here. You want to play basketball, it's here. Everything you want is here."