Can Gaza now create a viable economy?

"This is not a military airport," Abu Halib says. "We are not using F16s or Apaches. This is the main point of crossing of the Palestinians to the outside world." As such, he says he will applaud Israel's historic withdrawal from Gaza only when Palestinian planes are free to fly again. "Otherwise, Gaza will just remain a big prison."

Abu Halib's Gaza office is perched on the top floor of a building from which it is possible to see dust rising on the horizon - the marks of homes in recently evacuated Israeli settlements being razed.

It is an image that has caused a kind of cautious jubilation, mostly marked by a carpeting of competing victory posters - pasted up by Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claiming credit for the withdrawal. Palestinians here, warily waiting to take over the land once occupied by settlements, say that the true test of change will be how feasible it will be for people and products to go in and out.

But some Palestinians here say Gaza's economic recovery is not solely dependent on Israeli policy, but also on internal reform within the PA.

"What we are witnessing now is a state of deterioration and lawlessness," says Khalid Abdel Shafi, the head of the Gaza office the United Nations Development Program. "There is no security for business, conflicts are settled through families and not through courts, crime is spreading."

That lawlessness was evident Wednesday when militants dragged a former security chief - a cousin of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat - out of his home and shot him dead. While the shooting may have been score-settling, it represents a challenge to the state of law-and-order in the Palestinian territories.

"Without reform and the rule of law, it is impossible to do the work - and that's an issue that is totally related to the Palestinian Authority. They need to do their homework to make these conditions possible," says Mr. Abdel Shafi.

The first internal test will be what the PA chooses to do, for example, with the new land and water resources it stands to inherit when Israel vacates Gaza. To make use of the greenhouses built by Israeli settlers and now being turned over to Palestinian ownership, says Abdel Shafi, the resulting produce needs direct access to the Israeli market.

Samir Abu Mudalalah, an economist overseeing PA policy on the withdrawal, says now is a time to create jobs in Gaza itself. One place to start, he says, is with all of the 56 percent of Gazan factories that have been "disabled" over the past five years. Of those, he says, 16 percent were destroyed in the Israeli-Palestinian violence, while the other 40 percent became inoperable due to lack of ability to move goods in and out of Gaza.

• Wire reports contributed to this article.

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