Word: rafah
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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...
...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...
...Palestinian groups, including the Hawks' own defectors, who want to keep fighting the occupation. "The Israelis are allowing the Hawks to carry weapons on the streets," charges a Hamas member. A Palestinian was killed when Hawks opened fire on Hamas activists who threw stones at them in Gaza's Rafah refugee camp two weeks ago. Last week Fatah and Hamas engaged in tit-for-tat kidnappings of each other's members in Jabalia. The hostages were freed within 24 hours, but tension between the two main Palestinian groups remains high...
...official death toll in the rioting rose to 28 after the army confirmed Sunday that a 65-year-old man from the Gaza Strip city of Rafah died over the weekend of gunshot wounds sustained in protests last month...