The Guardian , The moment al-Brazil plunged into darkness, Amjad Alweda knew what was coming. He grabbed his wife and three young children and bundled them down a pitch-black stairwell to a room at the back of their small block of flats. And then he stopped and listened.
The sound of the tanks echoes along the streets around here so it seems they are coming from every direction at once and you never know which way to run,” says the 32-year-old Palestinian man.
Minutes later an engine roared and tons of steel – he didn't wait to discover whether it was a tank or a bulldozer – came crashing into the front of Alweda's computer shop. He squeezed his children through a back window and told them to run as the clanking monster tore at his livelihood.
“The soldiers were calling over the megaphones for everybody to leave their houses but there was no chance for people to get out before they started shooting from the tanks. It was completely dark and there were bullets flying around,” he says. “Usually, we try and stay in the house when the fighting starts but we knew the army had been everywhere else so it must be our turn.”
For two weeks now, the Israeli army has been grinding its way through Rafah refugee camp in the southern tip of the Gaza strip. “Operation Root Canal” is ostensibly aimed at destroying some of the dozens of tunnels the military says are used for smuggling weapons under the border with Egypt.
As about 65 tanks, armoured vehicles and mammoth armour-plated bulldozers rolled into Rafah, the Israeli army said it had intelligence that surface-to-air missiles were being hauled through the tunnels. But there was no sign of them as dozens of Palestinians attempted to exact some kind of price for the attack with pistols, AK-47s and homemade hand grenades. By the time the Israelis withdrew to the fringes of the camp where the tanks and bulldozers are perpetually at work, 18 Palestinians were dead, including three children under 15 years old, and more than 120 were wounded.
Just three tunnels were found, and no weapons. But in the process, the military crushed or rocketed nearly 200 homes, throwing about 1,700 people onto the street. The army claimed it never happened, that just 10 homes were wrecked, and then sent back the bulldozers to grind the evidence that the houses ever existed into the dirt.
The raid was one of the largest of the past three years of intifada, rivalling the notorious levelling of the heart of Jenin refugee camp last year in the scale of destruction, if not loss of life. Yet there was barely a peep of protest from Britain or other European countries over the attack, and President George Bush defended the Israeli assault as a necessary part of the war on terrorism.
There is no such thing as a quiet night in Rafah. The shooting usually begins around dusk, punching the darkness with rapid machinegun fire and tracer bullets for minutes at a time. Most of the Palestinian fire is aimed at the concrete pillboxes and lookout posts planted every 50 metres between the edge of Rafah and the Egyptian border where Israel retains control of a narrow strip of land along the frontier known as the Philadelphi road.
The border is a tangle of wire, broken buildings and mud, bearing a resemblance to a first world war battlefield. Not far beyond are the Egyptian lookout towers, a tantalising reminder to Rafah's 145,000 residents that there is world outside the occupation.
Palestinian bullets rarely reach their intended target. Israeli fire is more effective. The results can be seen peppered over the front of the houses that face the border, and in the death statistics.
Palestinians in Rafah have killed three soldiers and one Jewish settler during the intifada. The Israelis have killed about 280 people in Rafah over the past three years, accounting for about one in nine Palestinian deaths during the uprising and making the refugee camp and neighbouring small town one of the most dangerous places in the occupied territories. One in five of the dead are children or teenagers.
The Israeli military has designated Rafah a war zone. In doing so, the military exempts itself from many of its own restraints and provides a ready justification for the “collateral damage” of civilian deaths.
The government's view is summed up by a declaration signed by several cabinet ministers at an international summit in Jerusalem earlier this month that states “the war on radical Islam is a righteous cause. The state of Israel is, symbolically and operationally, on the frontline of the battle to defend civilisation.”
The latest battle was fought in al-Brazil, a civilian neighbourhood of Rafah refugee camp. The tanks moved in after dark, and the bulldozers tore down power lines. Among those fleeing as the tanks blasted away at Palestinian fighters was Naja Abu Neima, a 55-year-old grandmother. When she returned three days later, there was nothing left of her home. Today she is camped on an island of broken bricks and concrete under a makeshift shelter with a carpet on top and twisted metal sheeting against two sides.
“This tent represents all that is left of my house. All of our furniture, clothes, fridge, everything is destroyed,” she says. “They killed my son a few months ago, and now they have destroyed my house. The Israelis claim we are terrorists. What do you see with your own eyes?”
Most of the casualties ended up at Rafah's only hospital. The director, Dr Ali Mousa, is resigned to the parade of corpses but he was unprepared for those of a couple of young children. “Their bodies arrived here without any heads. Can you imagine how two children – 12 and 15 years old – come to be without heads? They were hit by a tank shell. What could they have done to tanks?” he says.
“This is the worst attack of the past three years because they closed Rafah from all sides. The attacks on the refugee camps on the border are taking more and more time. It used to be they came in for a few hours at a time, but now it's for days.”
Dr Mousa faced a daily battle to get the wounded out of the battle zone and to move the serious casualties on to better facilities elsewhere in the Gaza Strip. One of his medics was shot in the chest as he helped move a man with a gunshot wound to his head.
“Many people tell us about pregnant women trying to get to hospital by moving from house to house, trying not to get shot,” says Dr Mousa.
After smashing in the front of Alweda's store, the army decided that his home, two floors above the shop, would make a good sniper's nest. The flat has a view across the open ground in front of the buildings and up each of the approaching side streets. The snipers broke up the floor tiles in the hallway and packed the fragments into sandbags. The military also destroyed much of the furniture and Alweda's small computer store where dozens of machines lay among the rubble. “I work as a teacher in a refugee school. We are not highly paid. I earn $630 (
