Word: rafah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...blasts shatter the chill midnight. The sleepy Israeli soldiers throw down their cigarettes and rush to their heavy machine guns. There's a third percussion and then a fourth from the homemade grenades hurled at "Termite" post by Palestinians at the edge of the Rafah refugee camp. 2nd Lieut. Sama'ana Owdeh stares at the infrared screen linked to Termite's rooftop surveillance camera. He directs the camera at one cinder-block house, then another. His eyes twitch with tension and concentration. "You see them?" he barks to the men at their guns. Another grenade explodes, louder and nearer...
Silence in Rafah is only the momentary stillness at the heart of a hurricane, and the storm is the Aqsa intifadeh. For almost 17 months, the Palestinian uprising and Israel's harsh reaction to it have ravaged both sides of the Green Line, which separates Israel from the Palestinian territories. This town of 135,000 at the southern end of the Gaza Strip is the epicenter, where the intifadeh's ill effects are fiercest. There is no worse place to be an Israeli soldier; nowhere is it harder to live as a Palestinian...
...math is ugly. Israeli soldiers have endured 13 roadside bombs, 140 shootings and 920 grenades here in the past four months alone. In the Palestinian town, the toll of the intifadeh stands at 84 dead, 1,160 wounded and 240 homes demolished. Yet Rafah's devastation goes largely unnoticed. Because the town lies beyond a series of time-consuming and often dangerous Israeli checkpoints, few Jerusalem-based foreign correspondents or even Palestinian reporters working out of Gaza City get to Rafah. In Rafah, dead men and destroyed homes are mere footnotes to news roundups...
...Masry records each of the intifadeh's victims. On Dec. 2, he went early in the morning to the morgue at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. Laid out on the stainless-steel dissecting table was the small body of Mohammed Arja. Masry looked at the records sent up from Rafah, the town on the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt where Arja had been shot the previous day. The boy was 11. "I was angry as hell," Masry says. "I'd like to explode like one these damned bullets, I'm so angry...