Life and death amid the ruins of Rafah

Khadra Abu Nameh, a sunken-eyed, blunt-nosed woman with a shawl wrapped around her head, stares coldly from behind gold-framed glasses. She squats a few yards from the mass of rubble and broken concrete that was once her home. Her granddaughter Fatima plays in the dirt with a piece of wire and a crushed plastic cup.

Mrs. Abu Nameh makes no plea for pity. "It was a wonderful surprise," she says, when she saw what Israeli forces had done to her home, her voice stiff with sarcasm. "The same as when someone offers you a flower."

This is Rafah, a town and a refugee camp at the southern end of the Gaza Strip that is home to some 90,000 people, and these are not days for flowers. In some ways this sandy stretch abutting Egypt is ground zero of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. People on both sides consider it the most violent corner of their struggle.

The military positions that Israel maintains along the Egyptian-Gaza border have offered Palestinian militants a target for bullets and hand grenades, many of them homemade. The Israelis have responded with bombs and bullets of their own and by demolishing homes, acts that have cleared out many of the residents of this once densely populated area.

The numbers of dead are disproportionate, and reflect the imbalances between Israel's well-equipped troops and Palestinian militants, who include terrorists determined to kill civilians and guerrilla fighters willing to engage in against-the-odds attacks against their occupiers.

Palestinian officials in Rafah say 259 people - including 46 children and an unspecified number of militants - have been killed in the governorate since open warfare broke out in late September 2000.

Just three Israeli soldiers have been killed in that period, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but apparently not because the Palestinians aren't trying. Against their positions in Rafah, the IDF counts 462 shooting incidents, 1,387 hand-grenade attacks, and 219 cases where Palestinians used antitank weapons, mortars, or bombs to assault the Israelis.

Israeli forces this month conducted their most sustained incursion into Rafah, at least in part to search for and destroy tunnels used by the Palestinians to smuggle weapons from Egypt into Gaza.

"There are some tunnels," says Omar al-Naqi, an aide to Rafah's governor, "but this is not the real reason behind [the Israeli] campaign." The true goal, many Palestinians assert, is to destroy Rafah and create a buffer zone along the Egyptian border.

The Israelis demolished the Abu Nameh home during their 10-day invasion because it hid a tunnel to Egypt, according to a local Palestinian official who gave his name as Abu Ghazi. He spoke with unusual candor about the existence of the tunnels, but insisted that they were not a project of the Palestinian Authority.

"There are tunnels in Rafah, no doubt," said Mr. Abu Ghazi. "But do tunnels serve the Palestinian national cause? No.

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