By IPS Correspondents
RAFAH, Nov 3 2003 (IPS)

A camouflage-green bulldozer of the Israeli army slowly flattens the moonscape that marks the border between the Gaza strip and Egypt. There is a huge gap in the row of houses here in Rafah town straddling the border. The buildings around are pockmarked by bullets.

“Last time the tanks came to there,” says 18-year old Ahmed Radwan from Yibneh neighbourhood in Rafah, pointing to the gap. “They shot at everything that moved and damaged a lot of buildings.”

Israel said the incursion was made to search for tunnels used to smuggle weapons in from Egypt.

Ahmed still sleeps in the house that he says his family abandoned during the latest Israeli incursion two weeks ago. “My parents and my brothers sleep in tents in the football stadium,” he says. “I don’t want to do that.”

Rafah in the far south of the Gaza strip on the border with Egypt is surrounded by refugee ‘camps’, with more than 120,000 people living in them. After the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 1994, the kept control over the border area, as agreed in the Oslo peace accords.

Since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, this border area has become the most violent place in the Palestinian territories.

Militant groups attack army positions and patrols along the border with clockwork regularity. Israel counters with incursions into the built-up area of the town that comes right up to the border, to weed out militants and to search for tunnels from Egypt through which it says drugs and arms are smuggled.

Rafah is the closest thing in this conflict to an actual front line.

“There’s fighting and shooting every night here,” says Radwan. His windows look straight out on the iron-segmented wall that is the border with Egypt. By the looks of it, all the houses nearest to the wall are damaged and abandoned.

The Rafah governor’s office and the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees estimate that during Israel’s major October incursion, more than 160 homes were destroyed or damaged here. As many as 16 people may have been killed, including women and children, they say.

The army acknowledges widespread damage and casualties during the incursion. A spokesman says the houses targeted had something to do with the tunnels, or they were used by militants to shoot at the army.

“The resistance was very, very hard,” the army spokesman says. “There was fighting during the two or three first nights in Rafah. There was shooting everywhere, even mortar shells, anti-tank rockets, whatever. It was a battle.”

The army says a large amount of weapons are smuggled into Gaza through the tunnels. The Palestinian Authority also uses the route in order to “re-arm”, says the army spokesman. The tunnels have become a major preoccupation of the Israelis.

In the Salaam neighbourhood of Rafah, the house that belonged to someone local people call “the doctor” is now partly destroyed. One part of the roof that caved in dangles dangerously over what looks like a cellar.

The house of this “doctor” is about 100 metres from the border. “That is where the tunnel was,” says a neighbour.

On the other side of the border an Egyptian flag flies on top of a guard house.

The neighbour points to a rough mix of dried concrete at the house. “They sealed off the entrance with cement,” he says. The Palestinian Authority did this before the Israelis destroyed the house, he says.

At the Rafah Governor’s office, spokesman Omar al-Naqa says the Palestinian Authority does everything in its power to stop the smuggling. “The PA does not want to give the Israelis an excuse to come in and destroy houses,” says Al- Naqa. “That is why they do act against the tunnels.”

Rafah has been the hardest hit town during the last three years, he says. Close to 300 people have died in the fighting, and more than 600 houses have been totally destroyed.

Al-Naqa says the Israelis are not just interested in the tunnels. “If that is all, then why would they destroy so many houses, just for two or three tunnels?”

The real intention of the Israeli army is to create a wide “buffer zone” along the border, he says.

The Israeli army spokesman says that under the Oslo agreements Israel exerts security control over a border area that at some points extends several hundreds of metres into Rafah. But he denies that the army’s goal is to destroy all the houses in this zone.

The action against the tunnels is an “ongoing operation”, he says. This year alone, he says the army has uncovered 36 tunnels. “The goal is to ensure the safety of our troops.”

The Palestinians acknowledge that the tunnels exist but say there are other ways of procuring arms that are more profitable.

The Israeli army seems genuinely to be searching for tunnels. Several of the destroyed houses lie in the middle of Rafah hundreds of meters from the border, and not in an area that could apparently become a buffer zone.

Local residents confirm that there were entrances to tunnels in those houses.

The net effect of all the operations and the fighting is nevertheless to create a buffer zone. The army spokesman acknowledges as much when he talks about the fate of the people who used to live in the houses damaged in the latest operation.

“Most of the houses there were abandoned, people can’t live there,” he says. “The houses that are close to the Egyptian border, there is shooting and firing all day, the houses are full of holes and damage that comes from the shooting, from the Palestinian and the Israeli sides. It’s a firing zone, how can people live in a firing zone?”

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