Word: rafah
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...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...
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...