Desperation Grows at Border Crossing

By SCOTT WILSON

By Scott Wilson

The Washington Post

GAZA CITY, gaza strip

At the Erez crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip, a man with a three-day growth of beard raised his fist and let out a scream amid the stench and desperation of the dozens of men, women and children who have been gathered here for days, unable to go forward, unwilling to go back.

“Let us die in Gaza instead of dying in this humiliation,” he shouted. “Let us die with honor.”

Um Mohammed did not move. Instead, she sat bundled in a head scarf in the intense afternoon heat. Like many of those around her, she arrived here five days ago after Hamas’ militia launched its final push to take control of Gaza. Bundling up her four children, Mohammed fled Gaza for the crossing, hoping to return to her home in the West Bank city of Jericho.

Israel has kept this border passage closed, citing security concerns and a problem coordinating passage with Hamas, whose military conquest of Gaza has solidified the strip’s political and cultural isolation from the West Bank. As a result of the closure, hundreds of Palestinians remained crammed Tuesday inside the 900- foot-long tunnel, living amid trash, human waste and the debris from recent looting that even stripped bare the crossing point’s small mosque.

The walk through Erez on Tuesday provided a grim passage into a stretch of coastline utterly changed by Hamas’ military rout of Fatah forces last week. The intensity of the Hamas campaign and the accounts of doctors, fighters and survivors who witnessed it suggest that a furious score-settling had taken place .

Evidence of the change was everywhere. Hamas gunmen shouted “Welcome!” to visitors from checkpoints that were operated by Fatah- controlled forces last week. Elsewhere, victorious Hamas fighters tidied up the grounds of battered Fatah security posts, showing off now-empty cells where some of their leaders were held and allegedly tortured over a decade ago.

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