Word: gaza
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...Fire Mountain" is almost an Arab town. Minarets spear the sky, houses lean against each other haphazardly, Arabic graffiti smears a few walls and broken cars litter the crooked lanes. But in fact it's an elaborate reconstruction tucked inside an Israeli military base close to Gaza. On Fire Mountain, Israeli reservists - normal men yanked out of comfortable lives at times of national crisis - get last-minute instruction on how to storm a house: one soldier lobs a grenade into a doorway while another scans the rooftops nearby for snipers...
...These will be the tactics if Israel decides to launch "Phase Three" in Gaza, a thrust into the heart of the besieged Palestinian enclave by thousands of troops. Phase Three seems inevitable now that Israel and Hamas have both rejected a United Nations ceasefire call and a French-Egyptian peace proposal. "All that's left to do is to give the order, and we'll start moving in the direction of the Gaza Strip," a commander of the reservist battalions told the Israeli daily Ma'ariv. On Saturday, Israeli planes dropped thousands of leaflets warning of more fighting to come...
...soon as my wife saw me take a deep breath, she knew it was from the army, that I was being called up for Gaza. And she started crying," says Seigelman, 30, a wiry reserve officer who has faced combat before. "She didn't want me to go. Our baby is only a month old." For Seigelman, there was never any doubt; "I knew what I was in for, but it has to be done," he says grimly...
...Inside their tents, reservists banter about wives, girlfriends, or jobs - anything but what awaits them in Gaza. Once they cross over, the soldiers are forbidden from calling home on their cell phones. "So after I go in, the next call my wife gets will either be from me telling her I'm safe, or from the IDF," says Seigelman...
Safa Joudeh is a Palestinian journalist. She lives with her family in Gaza...