In a small shop by their rocketed, bullet-pocked apartment building, the Abed Rabo family argued raucously about the impact of the 48-hour Israeli military incursion, which killed nearly 100 Palestinians, including some neighbors.
“We all support resistance to the Israelis,” said Hitam Abed Rabo, 33, a lawyer with the military court set up by Hamas, which she supports. “They talk about responding to rockets, but nothing justifies what the Israelis did here. They have to be confronted with strong resistance, so they don’t come back.”
Will firing rockets on Israeli towns bring independence and freedom? “Yes,” she said. “Absolutely.”
Ayash Abed Rabo, 34, her cousin, scoffed. “These rockets are a joke,” he said. “We want to live. We want peace. I don’t want Israel here, and I don’t want resistance.”
It was a conversation that, in various forms, was repeated across the Gaza Strip this week.
Israeli officials say the operation was meant to show Hamas — the militant Islamist group in power here, which opposes peace with Israel — the cost of continuing to fire rockets, especially the longer range ones, and to try to create further popular dissatisfaction with Hamas. Arguments persist over how many of the dead were truly uninvolved civilians, with Palestinian officials saying half or more than half, and Israel saying far less than half.
But the residents here were horrified by the numbers of civilians they believed had died, and even officials here of Fatah — the more secular Palestinian party negotiating with Israel — think the popular reaction has served to strengthen Hamas by turning it into the victim, at least in the short term.
Nabil Katari, 46, is a local organizer for the Fatah youth, and his brother is a prominent local member of Hamas. “I think Israel is strengthening Hamas by aiming at civilians,” he said, a charge Israel vehemently denies. “People always sympathize with the fighters and the victims.”
Worse, he said, both Hamas and Israel are exaggerating the threat and the number of weapons here. “When we claim we have a lot and really don’t have much compared to the Israelis, we serve their interests and let them justify hitting so hard,” he said. “I feel something catastrophic coming.”
The Abed Rabo family has traditional ties to Fatah, like many of those along Al Quds Street here in eastern Jabaliya, where the Israeli forces concentrated and where mourning tents now line the road.
Mr. Abed Rabo owns the shop, and he, like the other 60 people in the building, many of them relatives, were kept in a single room by Israeli soldiers during the incursion. Hitam went to march on Monday in the large Hamas demonstration celebrating the Israeli withdrawal, which Hamas called a victory. Ayash said: “That celebration was a lie. To celebrate what? More than 100 people killed? And only two Israelis were killed?”
Hitam broke in. “It was a celebration. We pushed them out. We aren’t equal militarily, and two dead soldiers is a lot for them. And it was a celebration because our dead are martyrs and will go to paradise. They were strong and powerful.”
There is anxiety in Gaza about Hamas, which has moved swiftly to consolidate its power and whose armed policemen and military men are visible in the streets. They provide order and have ended security chaos and much crime, but they are also an intimidating force, smoothly breaking up a Fatah rally called for Wednesday by changing its venue, turning back buses of supporters trying to reach Gaza City and putting hundreds of men, armed with guns and wooden sticks, along the streets.
Ayash Abed Rabo, the shop owner, said: “People are afraid to express themselves fully. We spoke to you, but someone will go to them and say that you were here and that this is what was said by whom. But I’m not afraid — I haven’t said anything that Mahmoud Abbas hasn’t said, and he’s the president.”
Fawzi Barhoum, the Hamas spokesman, said in an interview that people were free to express themselves, and that the dead died honorably. “The number of martyrs is the price of convincing world opinion about the justice of the Palestinian cause,” he said. “The celebration was in support of the martyrs and of resistance as a choice.”
He insisted that Hamas was in control of Gaza and coordinated rocket firing with other groups, but a moment later said that Hamas would not stop other groups from firing rockets and resisting Israel in their own fashion. But he also said that the number of rockets fired depended on Hamas’s calculation of the Palestinian interest at the time, and that Mr. Abbas’s negotiations with Israel were futile and a form of collaboration. “The Hamas project is liberation, and Hamas believes that Israel only understands the language of force.”
Mr. Barhoum, too, seemed to think that this incursion was a kind of advertisement for the future, and insisted that Israel would fail in any larger military operation, “which will just increase the popularity of Hamas.”
The intense fighting here took place during the first two hours of the incursion Saturday just after midnight, when most of the fighters were killed. Most of the time Israeli soldiers took up positions, moved from house to house, looked for weapons, interrogated young people and arrested several dozen for further questioning inside Israel.
Tanks and armored bulldozers chopped up pavements and broke down walls, knocking down hundreds of yards of electricity and telephone cables, now being respliced. But the damage is relatively limited, and the incursion seems to have been a kind of exercise in how to take over a heavily populated area from which Hamas and other gunmen are fighting and firing rockets.
Residents say the Israeli soldiers were more anxious than during past incursions, and gruffer. At least four young men said independently that the soldiers used them as human shields. The young men were blindfolded and handcuffed, and then lined up, two or three at a time, in front of an Israeli soldier, they said, who guided them from behind as they moved down this street or entered another building. Sometimes, they said, a soldier used their shoulders as props for his M-16 rifle.
The young men — Riad Abed Rabo, 26; his brother, Muhammad, 21; his cousin Majdi, also 21; and Hassan Abu Sabah, 32 — all said that the Israelis picked them out from the rooms in which building residents were kept, searched them, handcuffed and blindfolded them, and used them as shields before letting them go seven to eight hours later. The use of civilians as shields has been banned by Israel’s Supreme Court. A military spokesman said that some young men were cuffed, blindfolded and walked to an interrogation center, but denied that anyone was used as a human shield.
Some 50 yards down the street, next to a bullet-hole-pocked Internet cafe painted with the Microsoft Windows logo and the slogan, “Word without Borders,” there was another mourning tent, the site of an extraordinary political and family drama.
The family of Muhammad Abu Shbak, 37, lives here. Mr. Abu Shbak is a cousin and was a bodyguard of an important Fatah general, Rashid Abu Shbak, an ally of Muhammad Dahlan and his successor as chief of preventive security. After numerous assassination attempts by Hamas and its allies, Rashid Abu Shbak fled Gaza for Egypt. Muhammad Abu Shbak fled to Ramallah, in the West Bank, when Hamas forces routed Fatah forces last June, and neither dared to return.
Mirvat Abu Shbak, 34, Muhammad’s wife, stayed behind with their five children. The two eldest — Jacqueline, 17, and Iyad, 16 — were killed in the incursion, and Mirvat insists they were shot by an Israeli sniper.
“We were sleeping at midnight when there was a lot of shooting,” she said, in a room of mourning women, sitting on floor cushions under a patterned nylon blanket. “An Israeli sniper took a position in the house next door, and he could see me, and me him,” she said. “I was with all my kids. At 2 a.m., Iyad wanted to go to the bathroom, and when he got up they shot him in the chest, and I could feel the bullet pressing out his back,” she said.
“Jacqueline had been sleeping, and woke up and said, ‘My mother, Iyad is injured,’ and she moved her head a little and she was shot in the mouth, and the bullet came out the back of her head.” Mrs. Abu Shbak kept her composure, as her relatives patted her hand.
“There was blood everywhere, and I fell to the floor, and the sniper kept shooting, every 30 seconds, and I managed to help my children crawl out of the room.”
Her husband, she thought, could never return. But with the help of the Hamas brother of Nabil Katari, the Fatah organizer, who arranged a safe passage for him, Mr. Abu Shbak arrived home Tuesday night.
On Wednesday, he, too, was at the mourning tent, with Khaled al-Batsh, the head of Islamic Jihad here, watching over him. “Now I’m back, I’m not going to leave,” Mr. Abu Shbak said. “I think Hamas will be no problem. We are one people.”
He spoke to Jacqueline on the phone 20 minutes before she died, he said. “She wanted to tell me her exam results — she got 97 percent, this I remember, and Iyad told me, ‘I miss you a lot, Dad.’ ” He seemed shaky and spoke quietly. “I give the blood of my children as a gift to national unity,” he said. “All my interest now is unity. We have to end the division.”
Mr. Katari, their neighbor, thinks unity is far away. “Hamas is very closed-minded,” he said. “Abu Shbak wants to stay here, but he should probably take his family and go.”
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