David Pratt: Gaza is at the burning heart of this conflict

Within minutes, we had pulled up in a rutted dirt alleyway inside the camp itself which as far back as 1989 was home to more than 50,000 people, half of them under the age of 15. Everywhere across the camp, it seemed, these kids moved in wandering bands, scavenging, cursing and falling into stone-throwing battles with roaming Israeli patrols.

I had come to speak with the mother of one of these children, a woman called Khadeja Ayoup Gharab. She herself was only nine years old when her family was driven out of the coastal city of Ashkelon by the fighting, mass expulsions and massacres of the war against the Israelis in 1948.

Khadeja remembered the “Nakba”, or “catastrophe” as Palestinians have since called those days, as the time when seven of her family were killed in a bombing attack that destroyed their home.

Rescued from the rubble, alive but injured, Khadeja, her parents, two brothers and a sister, walked all the way from Ashkelon to Gaza, arriving with only the clothes they were wearing.

Within minutes of my arrival at her home that day back in 1989 at the height of the first Palestinian “intifada”, or uprising, Khadeja disappeared inside her tiny house to collect some documents she wanted me to see.

As we sipped black tea laced with fresh mint, she reached into a worn leather pouch and delicately unfolded some wafer-thin sepia-coloured papers. The documents, from the government of Palestine in the days when it was a British mandate, were title deeds.

They had been issued under the land settlement ordinance of 1928, and were proof of the registration and ownership of Khadeja’s family house in Ashkelon.

“This shows that the house and land is ours, and that it was taken away from us by force,” she told me, before folding the faded paper away again in its pouch.

“Yes,” she shrugged, “we still call Ashkelon our real home, but I doubt we can ever go back.

“Can you imagine the Israelis allowing that?” she asked, rubbing the palms of her hands together in that familiar Arab gesture that suggests the subject is khalas – finished or closed.

A house in Mishmeret, central Israel, hit by a rocket from the Gaza Strip on March 25 – an event leading to renewed fears of war

Thirty years have now passed since I sat listening to Khadeja’s story of how she fled to Gaza all those years before. Today, I have no idea what became of her and the family she had raised in the squalor of Beach refugee camp.

One thing is almost certain about their fate though. It’s that like most Palestinians forced from their homes back in 1948 who ended up in Gaza, they have never been allowed to return to their original towns, cities and villages.

In the Middle East, dates and anniversaries are of immense importance, for they so often act as both an anchor to the past and a stabilizer to the present and future. This weekend, Palestinians in Gaza will mark another important date and anniversary, taking again to the streets one year on from the Great March of Return protests that started last March.

These protests commemorating the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees when Israel was established in 1948 were launched last year in an effort to lift a blockade that has trapped the coastal strip’s two million residents for decades and to push for recognition of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

For those Palestinians in Gaza, the cost of the protests has been colossal.

According to the UN, which has accused Israeli snipers of intentionally firing on civilians, new casualty figures show the devastating impact to date.

In all, some 194 Palestinians, including 41 children, have been killed at the weekly demonstrations. Close to 29,000 have been wounded, a quarter of them shot. In the same period, one Israeli soldier has been killed.

The figures are yet another stark reminder of the cauldron that Gaza is and always has been during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a battle the Israeli writer Amos Elon once described as an “irresistible force colliding with an immovable body”.

During the decades of covering this struggle, I, like other outsiders, quickly realised that Gaza was hardcore.

Home to the toughest Palestinian resistance and the Israeli military’s most punitive tactics, it had never surprised me that it was here that the first intifada had broken out. This long-fought-over finger of land, one of the most densely populated places on the planet, has at different times been not only the base for the most extreme Palestinian groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas, but home to the most stubborn and committed of Israeli settlers who regarded Gaza as part of a biblical greater Israel.

It’s hard to believe that it’s now 15 years since Israel undertook its so-called “disengagement” plan that would see the closure of its settlements in Gaza. At the time the move was called many things. Among them, “the moment of truth”, “a test of unity” and “the ultimate betrayal”.

Depending on which side of the razor wire, checkpoint barriers or security fences you lived on, whether you were Arab or Jew, the start of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was seen as either the end of a dream or the chance of a new beginning.

FOR Issac Harel, it was definitely the end of a dream. It was only a few days before the withdrawal was due to begin that we found ourselves pushed shoulder to shoulder in a crush of more than 100,000 opponents to the Gaza pull-out, in the narrow cobbled alleyways that wind through Jerusalem’s old city leading down from Damascus Gate to the Western or Wailing Wall.

A settler in Gush Katif, one of the largest and most hardline settlements in Gaza, Issac had made the two-hour drive north to join the protest.

“See, look for yourself, so many of us, this is not something the Israeli people are taking lightly,” he shouted, as I helped him lift and pass the pushchair containing his baby son over a sea of heads in front of us, all wearing the Jewish yarmulke.

Issac had lived and worked as a vegetable farmer in Gush Katif for more than 10 years, and while he was totally opposed to being forced from his home, he rejected the idea of resisting the withdrawal using violence.

“Until the final moment I want to make it difficult for them. We will do everything possible to slow them down, but I will not use violence against our own soldiers,” he insisted, resigned to the fact that in the end he had no chance of winning.

As we talked, the rabbi leading the prayers at the Western Wall, or HaKotel as it is known in Hebrew, cried out his grief at the coming loss of the sacred land in Gaza. All around us were ultra-orthodox Jews; men, women, the elderly and the very young, standing rapt in prayer or openly weeping at the rabbi’s words of woe. Not everyone among the settlers however was as resigned as Issac.

Twenty-year-old Dan Amiel had lost his leg in a Palestinian rocket attack on the settlement of Kfar Darom ten months earlier. “I already left my leg in Gaza. Now they want me to leave behind my life,” he complained bitterly. Walking with the aid of a prosthetic limb, he, his wife and son had returned to Kfar Darom just a week before to join 400 other settlers determined to defy the forced removal.

Like so much of Gaza’s recent history, that period of withdrawal by the settlers was a time of bitterness and hope.

If Gaza for Palestinians was the harshest of frontlines in the fight against the Israeli occupation, then Khan Younis had long been its most frontline town.

A maze of narrow streets, the town sits right alongside the Israeli settlement of Gush Katif, from where soldiers in watchtowers kept an eye open for Palestinian militants who might try to launch mortar or rocket attacks or slip across in incursion operations.

It was in March 2004, one year before the settler withdrawal, that the Israelis bulldozed the home of Palestinian former geography teacher Abu Salah Shikir at the Tufaha crossing.

In Arabic, the word tufaha means apple. Nobody I spoke with quite seemed to know why the crossing was ever given this name. Perhaps there were orchards or fruit trees there once. There were certainly none there when I spoke with Abu Salah Shikir – only mounds of compressed concrete and steel that were once homes, before the Israeli tanks and bulldozers moved in.

A tall man with receding hair and a heavy moustache, he liked to write love poems and songs in his spare time.

“To say the settlers have ‘lost’ their homes is to use the wrong word. How can they come and occupy illegally and then lose anything?” he said, throwing my question back at me with irrefutable logic.

On the wall above him in the shack where he and his family now lived was the room’s only token decoration, a plaque with the words ‘I love you’ over the image of a single rose.

“I don’t hate the Jews,” he continued. “If another country came to Scotland and occupied it, would you give them a flower?” he asked in response to another of my questions and noticing me glance at the picture on the wall.

By now, Abu Salah Shikir found it painful to return to the ruins of his house at Tufaha crossing.

“In Gaza there is no gold, there is no oil, only sand and sadness. People eat their sadness daily,” he told me softly. His words resonate to this day.

“Some people are blood merchants. They received benefits from the existence of the Israeli occupation; when the occupation ends, they will lose out,’ he continued. I well recall not having the heart to disagree with him. To tell him that I thought Gaza and its long-suffering people were in for even more unpredictable and potentially volatile times ahead.

Not that you would have guessed this back then looking around at the flag shops decked out with their special T-shirts celebrating the Israeli “withdrawal” and “victory of the intifada”. As someone said at the time, it was as if Gaza was dressed up for a wedding but prepared for a funeral.

Flags then were one of Gaza’s few growth industries – not surprising really, given the range of political customers around. From almost every rooftop antenna, mast or pole flew the flags of Gaza’s myriad Palestinian factions.

There was the green of Hamas, yellow of Fatah, pale blue of the Abu Rish Brigades, white of the al-Aqsa Brigades, and the black of Islamic Jihad. Their presence would always make Gaza the ultimate Israeli target.

Fourteen years on from those days when Israeli settlements were closed in Gaza, the Jewish state continues to militarily bludgeon this tiny strip of land, and life for Palestinians in the strip is probably more desperate than it’s ever been.

For its part, Israel insists it’s only defending itself against rocket attacks by Palestinian militants that continue to target Israeli towns outside Gaza and again recently in the city of Tel Aviv, itself provoking airstrikes and bombardments.

Seen, too, from Israel’s perspective, the Great March of Return protests calling for Palestinian refugees to be allowed back to their former homes now inside Israel is viewed as nothing less than advocating for the destruction of the Israeli state.

Amid all this bitterness and rancour there is no doubt that each community has a story to tell, a litany of atrocities that has befallen them over the years at the hands of each other’s soldiers, gunmen, bombers and assassins.

Indeed, one of the greatest difficulties facing any reporter of this conflict has always been the extent to which these dual narratives and the bloodshed that accompanies them have a way of blurring the specifics of each individual tragedy.

For months now, Israel and Gaza have once again been on the brink of war, and it’s possible that the next few days might see both sides pushed ever closer to that horrific outcome.

As Palestinians in Gaza again head to the fences with Israel that effectively serve as their prison walls, to mark one year since they began weekly demonstrations, they know from bitter experience the price they might again pay. As ever, Gaza the cauldron remains the burning heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.