On Gaza's borders, anxiety mounts

After five days caught between Hamas and Israel on Gaza's northern border, Nader's ordeal was over.

With a bandage and brace supporting his arm wounded in a shootout Monday evening, the son of a Fatah intelligence officer sat in the orthopedic ward at Ashkelon's Barzilay hospital talking to friends and family on a mobile phone.

As uncertainty and degradation grew in the coastal strip following last week's takeover by Hamas, the militant Islamic resistance movement, hundreds of Gazans rushed to flee. Nader, who declined to give his surname, was among the handful allowed into Israel Wednesday.

Along with several other wounded and ill Palestinians and all foreign nationals living in Gaza, he was allowed to cross over the Erez crossing. But he still doesn't know if he will get permission to seek asylum in the West Bank or whether Israel will force him to return to Gaza, where he is convinced he will be harmed by Hamas militants.

"If you are not Hamas, you are the enemy," he says.

Palestinians along the border who have family members in Gaza reported that Hamas operatives were said to be patrolling neighborhoods with megaphones, and computerized lists demanding Fatah members turn themselves in along with their weapons. Families with relatives that fled to the West Bank, where Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah has consolidated control, were threatened with violence, they said.

Israeli security officials have been reluctant let the refugees through, arguing that they could pose a security risk and insisting that Hamas was not harming those who chose to turn back."These people are not refugees. These people have houses in Gaza and they have a place to return to," says Shady Yassin, a spokesman for the Israeli liaison office at the Gaza border. "There are women and children, but there are also extremists, and it's difficult to know who they are."

The threat of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza is increased pressure on Israel to open the Karni crossing, the main commercial junction, to humanitarian aid. The United Nation's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, "the reopening of Karni crossing is vital to prevent general food shortages in two to four weeks."

On the Israeli side of the Erez crossing Wednesday, two buses pulled away carrying about 90 Ukrainian nationals – most of them children – stranded in Gaza for days because of the backup at the crossing. A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Israel said there were an additional 100 Russians poised to cross, but Israeli officials had held up passage of males because of their Palestinian nationality.

Anxiety is also growing on the border between Gaza and Egypt that is known for the underground tunnels that ferry supplies to weapons. Egypt has been trying to crack down on the smuggling tunnels and is under pressure from Israel, which says weapons smuggled through them from Egypt are arming militants in Gaza.

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