A day in the Rafah wasteland

Jerusalem Post ^ | May. 19, 2004 | MATTHEW GUTMAN

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Breathless, the gunman dashed up the hill, blood smeared on his face. Five bullets from an IDF sniper had whistled through Rafah's Tel e-Sultan neighborhood Tuesday afternoon, badly wounding two of his fellow gunmen as they took cover in a nearby house, but apparently missing him.

Less than a minute passed before an ambulance screamed to the site, dumped the wounded aboard, and sped away. Dozens of children and teenage boys, curious bystanders and supporters of the resistance against Israel, pointed the way to ambulance drivers.

The Gaza Strip's southernmost city of Rafah, the epicenter of the fiercest fighting between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops in recent weeks, claiming the lives of at least 17 Palestinians on Tuesday alone, is a city where militancy and civil society are virtually inseparable.

Israel claims that Palestinian terrorists use civilians as human shields, while Palestinians rebut that they fight from among civilians because they have nowhere else to fight.

Rafah seemed a ghost-town Tuesday. Clumps of men and boys, some firing assault rifles in the air, marched behind a car loaded with speakers leading chants.

Shopkeepers shuttered their stores and traffic was limited to journalists, ambulances shuttling in and out of battle zones, and gunmen.

No one saw the snipers. A youth, a darkish strip of peach fuzz sprouting on his upper lip, said the sniper hit the men from 500 meters away. "No, no," exclaimed other boys, who attributed an equal measure of mythical might and mercilessness to the IDF troops, it was over 1,000 meters.

Their real heroes, however, the men jogging to and from Tel e-Sultan gripping AK-47s, were in plainclothes; some their uncles, older brothers, or fathers.

The IDF incursion into Rafah partitioned the city's population into three broad categories: the gunmen and the boys who operate as scouts, diversions, and ambulance directors; families scurrying for shelter in their homes; and the dozens of families fleeing the center city neighborhood of Salah a-Din Gate.

One of those fleeing families, the Kishteh clan, lives along what is quickly becoming the front line of houses facing the Termit outpost, a heavily armed IDF post tasked with controlling, if from afar, the center city. It was at the family-owned six-floor apartment building, a relatively new apartment block with pink trimming, that Palestinian snipers killed two soldiers Friday. With several rows of houses to their south already mowed down, and the IDF clamoring to widen its Philadelphi Route security zone by another 150 meters, the Kishtehs figured it was time to leave.

On Tuesday, this native Rafah family packed its belongings onto a truck. Chairs, bureaus, beds, and even one of the family member's high-school graduation cap were crammed onto the flatbed. "We've been jailed from 2 a.m. to 5 p.m. There is no water, no electricity, there is shooting all day," said Fathi Salim Kishteh. "[Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon must find a solution," she pleaded to journalists.

"His soldiers were killed in this building, and we treated them with dignity. We want the same." They were to join a steady trickle of trucks and donkey-drawn carts heading away from Salah a-Din Gate, now dubbed by many "a wasteland." But hers was one of the more conciliatory voices on an otherwise bloody day.

Abu Samer Badrasawi, 70, stopped journalists to ask them, "Have you heard of Hiroshima? Well this is it." Like everyone asked in Rafah on Tuesday, Badrasawi insisted that the tunnels Israel hunted in the area were fictive.

One Palestinian wondered what would happen when Israel broadens its security zone. "Won't they have to guard the 50 meters nearest the city? Then to protect those positions, because the resistance will not stop, they will have to bulldoze more houses."

At first sight, a visit to the Rafah General Hospital Tuesday presented a gallery of the dead. The building's fa ade is plastered with "martyrs" posters, each posed with his weapon of choice: a pair of AK-47s, an M-16, and even the occasional Kassam rocket.

According to hospital director Dr. Ali Musa, of the 14 fatalities that arrived at his facility, all were males aged 16-40. He reported 26 wounded, most of them men, some of them boys, and a "few women and children," though he refused to specify.

Musa's office itself testified to the unity of civilian and militant in this city. From a stained wall opposite his desk, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, assassinated by Israel in late March, smiled down on him. A portrait of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat stared back at the founder of Hamas, and a snapshot of former Egyptian President Abdel Gamal Nasser was preserved under glass cover on Musa's desk.

Abdel Majid Nems, a fast-talking 13-year-old and Rafah's representative on the Gaza Strip's Youth Parliament, had followed several of the day's funerals and decided to stop by the hospital. There he greeted the wounded and ate a meal provided by Hamas. Outside, gunmen paced anxiously, waiting for medical reports about their comrades.

Asked whether he might one day become a fighter like the men he revered milling outside the building, Nems replied, "Who knows? But even if I wanted to be a fighter, I would not tell you. Who knows, maybe an Apache might assassinate me, too?"

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Asked whether he might one day become a fighter like the men he revered milling outside the building, Nems replied, "Who knows? But even if I wanted to be a fighter, I would not tell you. Who knows, maybe an Apache might assassinate me, too?"

This Arab learned fast.