Word: rafah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fact, certain Israeli measures are not qualitatively different than Dershowitz’s chilling proposal. On Jan. 10, for example, Israeli Defense Forces arrived in the middle of the night, with no prior warning, and demolished 60 houses in the Rafah refugee camp, near the Egyptian border. Families awoke in panic, grabbed their children and fled, while the bulldozers destroyed their houses with all their possessions inside. Over 600 people were made homeless that night. It is hard to think of any neutral definition of terrorism that would not encompass this...
Mohammed Najjar, 27, cleans the mud floor of his tent, one of three dozen pitched along Rafah's main street. It has been his home since last month, when Israeli troops bulldozed his house in Block O, the section of the refugee camp next to Termite. With a rake, Najjar gathers cigarette butts and candy wrappers swept into the tent by the downpour of the past few hours. "It's cold in here, isn't it?" he says...
...Rafah sits along the border with Egypt, so Palestinians dig tunnels to smuggle in cigarettes, hashish, baby formula--and arms. Israeli troops try to find the tunnels and shut them down. To divert the soldiers while the smugglers dig, Palestinians launch nightly assaults on Termite from Block O. Israel, in turn, tries to make Termite safer by bulldozing nearby homes, like Najjar...
...tunnel action is shared by a few Rafah clans. The stretch of border by Block O is tunneled by the Shouarahs; the Akhras clan digs beneath Block J. Most tunnels are terrifyingly narrow--2 ft. by 2 ft.--built without supports, and increasingly long, airless and dangerous. You would have to be desperate to claw your way through the earth like this. But with unemployment at 65%, Rafah isn't short of despairing men. The tunnels are their best hope. "This town would be a disaster if you couldn't smuggle across the border," says Fayez, a bootlegger who declines...
...dawn, Raviv brushes the outpost's floor to remove cigarette butts, spent machine-gun cartridges and the dirt that has blown in through the rifle slits. Not far away, Najjar will be raking out his tent after another night. In Rafah they sweep up the intifadeh's filth and wait for more grime to fall on them...