Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

Civilians Describe Abuse; Troops Lament Conditions

At a sandbagged military checkpoint on a bleak patch of asphalt in the West Bank, an Israeli soldier yanked 29-year-old Mohammad Yousef out of a Palestinian ambulance. When Yousef's medical papers were produced, the soldier waved them off and bellowed, "I wouldn't let you in even if you brought God here with you!"

In long lines nearby, hundreds of Palestinians on foot jammed against a narrow turnstile, each waiting to be allowed to proceed -- one by one -- through concrete lanes resembling cattle chutes. All males under the age of 30 were turned away. So were all students, male and female.

"Open! Open!" a chorus of angry men shouted at the armed Israeli soldiers who controlled the gates holding back the Palestinians. As a thin man with a swath of black stubble across his face squeezed through the turnstile, his 18-month-old toddler became wedged between the bars. "Open it! Open it!" he screamed, cursing at the soldiers and gripping the whimpering child by one arm.

For two neighboring societies segregated by the physical and psychological barriers of a conflict dragging into its fifth year, the most intimate contact between Israelis and Palestinians occurs over the barrel of a gun at the 61 manned military checkpoints throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Such encounters exact a heavy toll on both sides, as evinced by accounts from former checkpoint guards who describe working under dehumanizing conditions, and by numerous reports of abuses committed by such soldiers against Palestinian civilians.

"Most soldiers prefer to be under fire than at those roadblocks," said Staff Sgt. Ran Ridnick, 21, a marksman for the Israeli military's elite 202nd Paratroop Battalion who spent six months this year here at the Hawara checkpoint. "The mission is dreadful. . . . It tears you apart."

Michael Aman, 21, another staff sergeant who served in the same battalion, said: "Everyone, no matter how moral, if he feels a commitment to the mission, will or could fall into violence. We're all told we shouldn't behave badly to civilians -- never hit them, never yell. But after eight hours in the sun, you're not so strong."

The Israeli military says the checkpoints are necessary to protect Israel and Jewish settlements in the territories from Palestinian attackers. Government and military officials have repeatedly cited the system of checkpoints in the West Bank as one of several factors contributing to a steady reduction in the number of suicide bombings against Israeli targets in the past two years.

At the same time, Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups have documented hundreds of cases of abuse by Israeli troops against Palestinians at roadblocks: beatings, shootings, harassment, humiliation and life-threatening delays. Last year, a female Israeli soldier assigned to a Gaza Strip checkpoint was convicted of forcing a Palestinian woman at gunpoint to drink a bottle of cleaning fluid, according to court records. This month, soldiers at the Beit Iba checkpoint, not far from the Hawara checkpoint, ordered a Palestinian to open his violin case and play for them while the lines behind him grew.

At least 83 Palestinians seeking medical care have died during delays at checkpoints, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. At the same time, 39 Israeli soldiers and police officers have been killed at checkpoints and roadblocks, according to the Israeli military. A year ago, two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint south of Jerusalem were shot dead by a Palestinian who carried an automatic rifle rolled in a prayer rug.

A Glimpse of Brutality

The Hawara checkpoint sits on the edge of the village of the same name, just south of Nablus. It severs a pocked highway that is the main artery connecting the West Bank's northern cities to its major population centers in the south. The nearest border with Israel is 16 miles away as the crow flies, farther by road.

On days when the Hawara checkpoint is open, it is one of the busiest in the West Bank. Sometimes as many as 5,000 Palestinians a day request permission to cross. They stand in line in searing heat or icy rains, depending on the season, until they reach an open-air shed with a corrugated tin roof. Often packed together by the hundreds, they must then wait their turn to pass, one by one, through narrow metal turnstiles that the soldiers open and close electronically.

As the Palestinians inch forward, armed soldiers standing behind sandbagged concrete walls shout orders to have bags opened and their contents dumped on the ground. On one recent morning, soldiers demanded that a man squirt shaving cream from an aerosol can to verify its contents. They ordered another man to rip the red-and-silver wrapping paper off a box to reveal what was inside: a doll for his granddaughter.

"You can't look at a person and know if he's good or bad," said Israeli Sgt. Nadav Efrati, a stocky, square-faced 21-year-old who recently finished his military service after spending months at the Hawara checkpoint. He said the limited Arabic that the Israeli army teaches most of its soldiers exacerbates the friction between the two peoples. "The main words they taught us were: 'Stop. If not, I will shoot you,' " Efrati said.

Early this year, the tension and animosity between soldiers and Palestinians at the Hawara checkpoint sparked an incident so brutal that it spurred the Israeli military to confront the devastating effect the checkpoint system has had -- not only on Palestinian civilians, but also within its own ranks.

On an unusually cold January day, hundreds of Palestinians waited to pass through the Hawara checkpoint. Snow dusted the ground, and tempers and patience rubbed raw on both ends of the lines that crept toward the soldiers of the 202nd Paratroops. A camera crew from the army's Education Corps maneuvered around the soldiers and Palestinians, collecting video footage and interviews for a training tape.

"Go home! What's your problem?" shouted the checkpoint commander, a gaunt staff sergeant whose face was partially hidden beneath his helmet. The camera focused on the sergeant -- a Bedouin, rare in the Israeli military -- as he continued yelling in Arabic at an agitated Palestinian man grasping the hand of a small child. "Shut up! Shut up! Go back, go back, everyone go back. No one through -- everyone go back."

The video did not capture the next exchange, but other soldiers at the checkpoint said in interviews that the Palestinian man began screaming at the 23-year-old sergeant. The sergeant handcuffed the man with disposable plastic cuffs and ordered him to sit on the ground.

Suddenly, the camera jerked toward the sergeant. He bashed the Palestinian man in the face with his fist. The man's hysterical wife and two weeping children tried to squeeze between him and the sergeant. The soldier shoved the Palestinian into a hut as the army cameraman followed close behind.

The man's toddler son clung to his father's shirttail until soldiers brushed him away like a fly. The soldier flipped a blanket over the window of the hut, and the camera's audio picked up the Palestinian's muffled cries as the soldier punched him in the stomach.

"For them, you see, they don't have a problem getting beaten up," the sergeant explained before the video camera a short time later. "It's the humiliation in front of all the people, the wife and children. I try to do it so they don't see me, so it's not in front of the people."

A soldier from the Education Corps asked the sergeant why he had attacked a defenseless, handcuffed Palestinian.

"Because he was beaten, then everybody learns and no one fools around with us," the sergeant said. As he spoke, the camera shifted to the Palestinian's wife and children sitting in the dirt. The youngsters wore colorful party hats their mother had offered to distract them.

With the army video as evidence, Israeli military officials prosecuted the soldier -- one of only a handful of checkpoint abuse cases ever brought to court, according to lawyers and military officials.

After a five-day military trial, the sergeant pleaded guilty in late September to assault charges stemming from the beating. He also admitted beating at least eight other Palestinians at the checkpoint and smashing the windshields of 10 Palestinian taxicabs as commander of the post from mid-January through the end of February.

The court prohibited the publication of the soldier's name and home town for fear of retribution against him or his family.

The military indictment accused the sergeant of habitually using violence against Palestinians who refused his orders to wait in line or who shouted at him. In as many as five incidents, he "kicked them forcefully in their buttocks and pushed them backwards or assaulted them with punches and kicks," the indictment said. Other times he took recalcitrant men into "the women's checking tent that was empty and . . . beat them either by punching them or kicking them in their stomach."

A three-member military judicial panel sentenced him to six months in jail, half of which he had already served, and demoted him to the rank of private.

Checkpoint duty "is in the hands of a very small number of young soldiers who do not have the proper training and proficiency in security checks," the judges wrote. "It is difficult and wearing, threatening and frustrating. . . . In imposing the punishment, it is difficult to escape the fact that the accused had to face a situation which was above his powers."

'These Duties Corrupt'

The case exposed far more than a single soldier's violent misdeeds. During the trial, soldiers who had served at the Hawara checkpoint over the past year gave testimony describing what they said were common, accepted practices among combat soldiers who detested checkpoint duty and often received little or no training for what they considered a policeman's job. In testimony and in interviews, they also argued that the army and Israeli society should accept some of the blame for abuses that they said were the result of an impossible mission.

"When we do all these things, we are not doing it only to the Palestinians, but to ourselves, too," said Aman, who was a friend of the convicted sergeant and recently finished his military service. "The most important discussion should be in our own society. If you blame the soldiers, you miss the point. . . . These duties corrupt."

For the convicted sergeant, the pressures were magnified because he was a Bedouin, an Israeli Arab in an overwhelmingly Jewish army engaged in combat against Arabs. Service in the Israeli armed forces -- which is mandatory for Israelis -- is voluntary for members of the Bedouin tribes. "People in the village did not like it that I contributed to the army," the soldier said in court.

Unlike his Hebrew-speaking comrades, he understood every word the Palestinians uttered in Arabic. "I heard them behind my back," he testified. "Traitor. Dog."

After two weeks in command of the checkpoint, he said, he asked his senior officer, Lt. Col. Guy Hazut, to take him off the assignment. Hazut, a 15-year military veteran, said in court that he refused: "It didn't seem right for a commander to leave his soldiers three weeks before the end of their term."

The soldier's trial and the publicity surrounding it contributed to efforts by the military to provide more instruction to soldiers assigned to checkpoints, to improve facilities and to begin training a new military police corps, according to military officials. The soldiers who have served at the roadblocks said those initiatives were a start, but that they did not address the main problem.

The constant struggle to balance the security of their men and their country with the pleas of elderly women who remind the soldiers of their own stubborn grandmothers is emotionally debilitating, Staff Sgt. Sergey Zamensky, an emigrant from Siberia, said in an interview in the central Israeli industrial town of Rishon Letzion where he resides.

Zamensky, 21, also spent months at the Hawara checkpoint before he finished his tour of duty this summer. He and his fellow commanders described turning away a tearful young bride in a white gown on her wedding day and forcing students to miss final exams because the checkpoint was closed.

"Every day, the regulations were different," Zamensky said. "One day, you can let everyone pass; on another, no one is able to come in. It's very difficult to explain. They don't care if someone in Nablus wants to explode himself in Israel. They just want to live their life. Regardless of how strong you are, dealing with these problems is too much."

Zamensky, who attended many of the court sessions in support of his Bedouin friend and comrade, added: "They say if you're a good person, there's no way you should be doing anything like this and be violent. They don't understand the situation. They're living in a movie."

Palestinian Camp Is in Crossfire Between Gunmen, Israeli Army

RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip -- Azizah Abu Anzah was watching an Arab soap opera on television when a 56-ton armored bulldozer ate its way to her house in this Palestinian refugee camp on the Gaza Strip's southern edge.

The 30-year-old woman recalls grabbing her children and hiding behind a house in the next alley. She stole peeks around the corner as a blade taller than a man began scraping away her three-room home.

"All the neighbors came and ran inside to collect my furniture -- the bed, TV, my new washing machine, some blankets -- and the bulldozer didn't stop," Abu Anzah said. "We were all crying. It was a day I will never forget."

She and her husband, Musa, moved their family deeper into the refugee camp -- farther from the encroaching bulldozers, spasms of gunfire and thunderous tank rounds. But the bulldozers kept coming, flattening the neighborhood, house by house. Last week, 16 months after their first house was demolished, the Abu Anzahs' second home was demolished by Israeli forces during a new outbreak of battles between the Israeli military and Palestinian fighters.

This is the front line of the most perilous combat zone in the Palestinian territories. In the past week, 14 Palestinians and seven Israeli soldiers have been killed in the intense gun battles in the refugee camps and surrounding neighborhoods of Rafah. Since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, 257 Palestinians -- including at least 58 children and teenagers -- have died in clashes here, according to local medical officials and human rights organizations. The Israeli military said 10 of its soldiers have been killed here.

During the same 31/2-year period, Israeli military bulldozers have crushed 1,218 houses along the northern edge of the border between Gaza and Egypt, pushing back the city of Rafah and the adjacent refugee camp. A mile-long swath of broken concrete, splintered wood and twisted metal is all that remains of what Azizah Abu Anzah and others say was a close-knit community built by families and neighbors who gathered here a half-century ago in a cluster of U.N. tents.

"They've separated us," Abu Anzah said a few weeks ago in the house that has since been demolished. "All my neighbors were my relatives. Now they are scattered everywhere."

After Israel demolished between 80 and 120 homes in the Rafah camp this week, Israel's Supreme Court on Saturday granted a temporary injunction against demolition of homes here. The ban had been sought by a Palestinian rights group.

Israeli military commanders say Palestinian guerrillas launch more attacks against Israeli forces along this small stretch of the border than anywhere else in the Palestinian territories. Last year, the military recorded nearly 2,000 attacks against its soldiers along the border from antitank missiles, grenades, guns and bombs -- double the number of such incidents in the entire West Bank. Inside the border, the military has erected a 26-foot-high steel wall topped by bulletproof observation towers that house high-tech surveillance gear and soldiers armed with remote-controlled machine guns.

The houses along the border, the Israelis say, harbor Palestinian gunmen who shoot at soldiers, and many houses sit over the entrances to tunnels that smugglers use to bring weapons and contraband from Egypt. Bulldozing houses here, commanders maintain, is crucial to the fight against gunmen and smugglers. So while incursions by Israeli armor have become less frequent in the West Bank and other parts of the Gaza Strip, the pace has intensified in Rafah. Last year, the Israeli army demolished three times as many homes here as the year before, according to local Palestinian monitoring groups.

Abu Anzah and her neighbors say they are caught in the middle between the Israeli military and Palestinian guerrillas and criminal gangs. And they mourn not only the loss of lives and the destruction of houses, but also the street-by-street dismemberment of their community.

The neighborhoods within the Rafah refugee camp -- such as Abu Anzah's Block O -- retain the bureaucratic designations assigned by the United Nations in the early 1950s when the facility was created for Palestinians who either fled or were evicted from the new Jewish state. But they have evolved into intimate enclaves of one- and two-story cement homes and multistory apartments where three generations often share the same dwellings and neighbors marry neighbors, drawing communal bonds even tighter.

Now, more than 11,000 people -- about one of every 10 residents in the sprawling camp of nearly 100,000 people -- have been uprooted, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which administers refugee communities in the Gaza Strip. In Block O, one of the most ravaged neighborhoods in the camp, at least 570 houses -- nearly half of the community -- have been razed or so badly damaged that they are unsafe for habitation, according to records kept by a local association of owners of destroyed houses.

Under Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposal to withdraw Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers from the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials say, even more houses in Block O and adjoining neighborhoods may be bulldozed to expand security zones along the border access road called the Philadephi Road. Control of the southern Gaza border with Egypt is one of the most controversial issues to be resolved before any withdrawal plan could be implemented. This is because of the complex negotiations that would be required to shift authority from Israel to Egypt.

Abu Anzah, whose eyes are the dark brown of bittersweet chocolate, moved to Rafah with her brother from Algeria in 1994 in the political and economic afterglow of the Oslo peace accords. In those hopeful years, the refugee camp did not imply transience, but rather a community where she could spread familial roots.

"My father said, 'We have someone ready to take your hand,' " she reminisced. "It was a time of peace. Arab girls came here from all over to get married."

At summer's end, by family arrangement, she wed Musa Abu Anzah, a lifelong resident of the camp. Both were 20 years old. Within a year, their first daughter, Jehan, was born. Azizah Abu Anzah was surrounded by in-laws and embraced by a neighborhood of extended families in the camp's Block O.

When she delivered her babies -- Jehan, now 9, Jamallah, 5, and Mohammed, 3 -- "I would find all my family members around me," Azizah Abu Anzah said.

At the birth of baby Ola this year, she said, "No one was beside me."

She and her husband, who works in the customs office at the nearby international border crossing, were the last of their family to leave Block O. After the Israeli bulldozers flattened their home, which was in the center of the neighborhood, the family moved into a once elegant, butter-colored house abandoned by its Saudi owners.

In March, after the first suicide bombing carried out in Israel by Palestinians from fenced-in Gaza, the bulldozers rolled into Block O once more. Abu Anzah and her family fled with whatever they could carry, joining the swelling exodus from Block O.

Last week, the butter-colored house was pulverized by Israeli military forces.

'We Lost All of Our Lives'

Haneyyeh Ghoul, a grandmother of 26, didn't wait for the bulldozers to arrive.

"Bullets were coming inside our house," said Ghoul, 54, a stout woman draped in a billowing black burqa that exposed only a pudgy face and sandpaper hands. "We were always running in the middle of the night, carrying our children. They were panicked, wetting the bed, throwing up. It was a horror."

Two years ago, she moved part of her family out of the two-story house in Block O that she had spent half a lifetime scrimping to build. It was the house where Ghoul raised her five children and in which she was helping bring up a third generation.

Over the following months, all of her children and their families fled Block O. One son, Ayman, 27, was killed when shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell sliced through his body while he was helping his sister move.

The family house was bulldozed last October, Ghoul said.

"All we saved, we put into our house," said Ghoul's son, Ismail, 35. He figured the comfortable two-level house cost about $5,000 to build.

"We lost all of our lives," corrected his mother. "Not just our possessions -- the place where you lived with relatives and friends. You left a lot of feelings there."

"We ate every meal together," nodded Ismail.

Now Ghoul lives with two sons, a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren in the only affordable shelter she could find to rent in a city overrun by new refugees: a two-stall concrete shack previously used to house livestock. Other sons, daughters, in-laws and grandchildren are strewn across the Gaza Strip. When the Israeli military shuts down the checkpoints that cut Gaza into three sections, relatives who once lived within a few dozen feet of each other might as well live in different countries, Ghoul said.

The Ghouls, like hundreds of other Gaza families, are on a waiting list to receive a new house from the United Nations. Families that lost homes in 2001 are still waiting, and the Israeli military is bulldozing houses far faster than the United Nations can fund the building of new ones, according to U.N. records. About 100 houses have been finished in the past year, and another 300 are under construction on a former garbage dump at the eastern end of the Rafah border.

"Even if you have a new house, you can't forget about your old house," said Ghoul, sitting on a stool in the dust of the chicken run that is now her yard. "We've lost all our memories. Our life was in Block O."

Israeli military commanders said that in the course of their demolitions, they have discovered just more than 100 smuggling tunnels.

The devastation of Block O and surrounding neighborhoods and the frequent shooting are the results of "nearly four years of constant fighting and smuggling," said Maj. Gen. Yisrael Ziv, the Israeli military operations chief who was a former Gaza field commander. "Their philosophy is to try to create a war of attrition against our forces.

"The people there were suffering," he added. "Could we have prevented some damage there? Probably, yes. It's not a surgical thing. It's a terror war."

Local residents, especially the matriarchs such as Ghoul, say they are increasingly torn between their hostility toward the Israeli army and their anger at the local criminal mafias that build and control the tunnels.

"We'd tell the resistance, 'If they shoot, don't shoot back,' " Ghoul said. " 'If you shoot back, they'll harm us.' "

Fist-Size Bullet Marks

At 11:15 a.m. on a spring day in Block O, Jehan Abu Anzah sat on a stoop in her rumpled blue-and-white-striped school uniform, waiting for her mother, Azizah, to come downstairs and unlock the front door. A few feet away, Hallah Hamad, a 21/2-year-old, kicked at cigarette butts in the sand of the narrow alley. A team of three U.N.-sponsored psychological counselors stood nearby, advising Hallah's parents how to react when they hear shooting: Remain calm so as not to alarm the children.

Without warning, machine-gun fire crackled through the alley from the direction of the Israeli watchtower.

The adults -- parents, counselors and a reporter -- all flinched in the same instant, eyes searching instinctively for the nearest cover. Hallah, dark eyes wide with terror, clutched her father's worn pants leg with chubby fingers, whimpering like a puppy. Nine-year-old Jehan flung her books to the ground and slammed her palms against the metal door of her house, screaming in the frantic, high pitch of terror -- "Yama! Yama!" -- Mama! Mama!

"All of us feel scared," confessed Bushra Ayyash, one of the counselors, nervously tugging at the black burqa that shrouded her body. "What do you think this child feels, grabbing her father's leg?

"The people who still live in front of the Israeli troops feel more anger than those who ran way," Ayyash added. "They have the fear both of losing the house and of dying from the shooting. They feel their whole society is destroyed."

A few weeks ago, the two-story cinderblock house that Shadia and Abdulkarim Hamad shared with their seven children was peppered with bullet marks -- fist-size circles, jagged gouges big enough to fit an arm through, dozens of openings demonstrating the range of Israeli firepower.

Israeli military commanders said Palestinians frequently use the front rows of houses to shoot at soldiers in the guard towers and that troops shoot back in self-defense or to prevent suspected attacks.

Now Shadia Hamad, 42, whose soft round face and brown eyes reflect the weariness of permanent fatigue, clambered up the stairs to the second floor, offering a narrated tour of her house and her fears.

On a recent day, Israeli soldiers in a watchtower opened fire when her 12-year-old son Alaa went to the roof to feed the pigeons. At 11 a.m. on another day, two bullets smashed into the mirror on the bedroom vanity, inches from 16-year-old daughter Moha, who was brushing her thick black hair. Another day a projectile whizzed over Moha's shoulder as she bent to serve her father a glass of tea in the sitting room. Fourteen-year-old Walaa stumbled and broke her front teeth in the scramble down the dark, rail-less concrete stairwell to the first floor of the house.

At a neighbor's house, out of earshot of his parents, Alaa, brown eyes downcast, admitted, "I feel afraid."

When asked about his ambitions, he said, "I hope to be a doctor."

He hesitated a few seconds, then mumbled, "If I'm still alive."

Last week, as firefights erupted between Palestinian guerrillas armed with crude rocket-propelled grenade launchers and Israeli soldiers in armored personnel carriers and tanks, Alaa and his family evacuated their house, clutching the suitcases they kept packed for such emergencies. By Friday, their bullet-scarred house with its first-floor safe room was just another a heap of crumbled concrete.

Four years ago, Christmas shoppers waited in line to enter the Giacaman family's shop and buy their coveted olive-wood Nativity carvings, family members recall.

Last year, the shop had so few visitors that the Giacamans locked up early on Christmas day and ate their first Christmas dinner at home in decades. For a family that has been carving and selling Bethlehem's famous olive-wood figurines for four generations, it was no cause for celebration.

Today, theirs is one of the few wood carvers' shops still open in a city economically and psychologically devastated by more than three years of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. With most of their neighbors' stores shuttered and only a handful of browsers during what was once the busiest week of the year, it has been difficult to summon Christmas cheer in the place revered by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus.

"This is the first year we've had a tree since the intifada began," said Joseph Giacaman, a 43-year-old father of three, referring to the three-year-old Palestinian uprising. "We've had to force ourselves to have the Christmas feeling."

Tourism officials in this West Bank city estimate that 15,000 visitors made it here this year, a tiny fraction of the 1 million tourists who visited Israel. This holiday season has drawn a trickle of foreigners, mostly from Mediterranean countries and Asia, but Bethlehem's largely Palestinian population has been in no mood to greet them cheerily.

The majority of Bethlehem's residents have been trapped in the city by Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks since the uprising began. Forty percent of the workforce is unemployed, according to city officials. Four hundred shops -- most of the city's small businesses -- have had so little income that they have not paid city taxes in three years, municipal authorities said. Bethlehem's well-known defiance of and resistance against Israel has been replaced by despair, many residents said.

In an effort to demonstrate the city's isolation, a community group called the Civil Committee in Arab Sawahreh tried on Tuesday morning to send a man and a donkey-borne woman -- symbolizing Mary and Joseph on their Christmas journey to Bethlehem -- through one of the Israeli military checkpoints.

"When we arrived at the checkpoint, the Israeli soldiers prevented us from passing," said Osama Zahaikeh, one of the organizers. "We knew they would not let us through. The whole thing was a symbolic act to show we lack freedom of movement."

Israeli officials say the barrier is necessary to stop suicide bombers and other attackers, but earlier this year they determined that so little violence could be traced to Bethlehem that Palestinian security forces were allowed to return to the streets. On Tuesday, the military issued a statement saying some restrictions would be lifted to allow pilgrims, tourists, journalists and the few Palestinians with permits to travel outside their towns of residence to visit Bethlehem.

The Giacamans, a Roman Catholic family whose ancestors came here from Italy generations ago, are like many families in their efforts to survive in a place they say has become a prison under Israeli occupation.

Issa Giacaman, 62, who has invested a lifetime in the art of carving religious figures from the exquisitely grained wood of local olive trees, looked out the front door of his store onto Manger Square, which was devoid of tourists one morning this week.

"I feel like I'm totally crippled," said Giacaman, the family patriarch with a fringe of silvery-white hair and a first name that means "Jesus" in Arabic. "Some people just open their doors to allow fresh air into their shops. It's depressing. It's sad. Sometimes I just sleep the whole day."

Once among Bethlehem's most prosperous small business owners, the Giacamans employed 38 carvers and other workers when Pope John Paul II visited Bethlehem in 2000. Demand was so high that some customers were put on six-month waiting lists to receive their Nativity scenes -- some so intricately detailed that drills the size of dental tools are used to fashion the folds of the three wise men's cloaks.

Now the staff has dwindled to 10 people, who work at most three days a week and whose handiwork usually ends up collecting dust on the shop's shelves. Sales are about 1 percent of the volume they were in 2000, one of Bethlehem's best years for tourism, said Jack Giacaman, 32. He estimated that about five or six customers a week, most of them foreign diplomats posted in Israel, visit the shop.

In the spring of 2002, when Israeli forces surrounded the Church of the Nativity and laid siege to Palestinian gunmen and others inside, soldiers lived in the family's workshop for 38 days. They used boxes of the carved Nativity figures for firewood, said Angela Giacaman, 53, Jack's aunt, who produced photographs showing the damage.

Since Israel began construction of a barrier around Bethlehem -- a complex of multiple fences and patrol roads that will eventually encircle the town -- the family has lost nearly 80 acres of olive groves to the project, Jack Giacaman said. Some lay in the path of the barrier; most of the trees are on the other side and thus inaccessible to Bethlehem residents.

"We used to sell our olive oil," Giacaman said. "This year, for the first year, we had to buy olive oil."

Construction of the barrier, military operations, the erection of Jewish settlements and other Israeli activity around the West Bank has uprooted thousands of ancient olive trees, but wood carvers have salvaged some, allowing them to fashion figurines much larger than they would normally carve from the smallish branches of pruned trees. Giacaman family members say, however, that does not compensate for the estimated 250,000 Palestinian-owned olive trees that have been destroyed over the past three years.

Jack Giacaman met the woman who would become his wife last December when her family hid him from Israeli military patrols as he tried to make his way from Bethlehem to a nearby village during a curfew. But to travel to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to shop for the wedding gown, order invitations and make other preparations for the February wedding, the bride and groom were forced to sneak out of the city on foot, Giacaman said.

"We had to do things illegally -- it was very dangerous," said Giacaman, whose wife, Tamara, is now pregnant. "If they catch you, they put you in prison."

The couple spent the first day of their honeymoon at an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank. Bound for Jordan, where they had hoped to catch a plane to Dubai, they were turned back instead.

"We wanted to get out of this prison for a few days after we got married," he said. "Instead, we just came home and stayed in our house."

Source: The Washington Post

The hunt for suspected militants sent Sgt. Lirom Hakkak bashing his way through a wall into a Palestinian family's threadbare living room, his slender frame sweating under nearly 35 pounds of body armor and combat gear, his M-16 rifle ready.

He noticed the grandmother first, her creased face so blanched with terror that she appeared on the verge of collapse. A middle-aged couple huddled close by, trembling.

"They could be my parents," Hakkak, the 22-year-old son of an Israeli poet, recalled thinking. In that split second of recognition, he said, "you really feel disgusting. You see these people and you know the majority of them are innocent and you're taking away their rights. You also know you must do it."

With the Israel Defense Forces in the fourth year of battle with the Palestinians, the most dominant institution in Israeli society is also embroiled in a struggle over its own character, according to dozens of interviews with soldiers, officers, reservists and some of the nation's preeminent military analysts.

Officers and soldiers have begun publicly criticizing specific tactics that they consider dehumanizing to both their own troops and Palestinians. And while they do not question the need to prevent terrorist acts against Israelis, military officials and soldiers are speaking out with increasing frequency against a strategy that they say has forsaken negotiation and relied almost exclusively on military force to address the conflict.

Nearly 600 members of the armed forces have signed statements refusing to serve in the Palestinian territories. Active-duty and reserve personnel are criticizing the military in public. Parents of soldiers are speaking out as well, complaining that the protection of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not worth the loss of their sons and daughters.

Such issues are being debated at the highest levels of Israel's political and military leadership. At the end of last month, the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, told columnists from Israel's three leading newspapers that the road closures, curfews and roadblocks imposed on the Palestinian civilians were creating explosive levels of "hatred and terrorism" among the populace. Last week four former heads of the Shin Bet domestic security service said the government's actions and policies during the Palestinian uprising had gravely damaged Israel and its people.

While such public comments have infuriated Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a former general who favors stringent measures against the Palestinians, they reflect the anxieties of many active-duty soldiers and reservists over whether the military is provoking more terrorist attacks than it is preventing. In addition, members of the armed forces said they feared that some of the harsher tactics -- especially assassinations of suspected Palestinian militants, which often also cause civilian deaths -- are corrupting Israeli soldiers, and by extension, Israeli society.

"What's happening is terrible," said retired Brig. Gen. Nehemia Dagan, former chief of education for the armed services. "The ethics and morals of Israeli society are more important than killing the heads of Hamas or Islamic Jihad."

"It's a difficult type of war. It's harder to uphold ethics," said Asa Kasher, a professor of military studies at Tel Aviv University who is rewriting the armed forces' code of ethics, which he first wrote nine years ago. "There are no books on moral regulations for fighting terror."

While Kasher said he does not believe the core values of the Israeli military have changed, this conflict has "put people into utterly new situations -- whether it's a private at a checkpoint or the chief of staff."

"Even my friends who are Jewish think what the army is doing is wrong," said a 20-year-old first sergeant, Noam, who is a sniper in the 202nd Paratrooper Battalion. Israeli military officials requested that the full names of active-duty soldiers not be printed for fear that they could be subject to prosecution for war crimes in countries that oppose Israel's actions in the Palestinian territories. Noam said he has told his friends: "I'm not killing anyone for no reason. I'm doing this because I have to do it."

At the same time, many other soldiers assert they are proud of what they have done. For much of this year, Dor, a shy 19-year-old medical officer, was based with the paratroops near the West Bank city of Nablus. He was only 27 miles from his home in Netanya, an Israeli seaside city that has been the target of six suicide bombings since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000.

"You think of your girlfriend sitting in a cafe, and it makes things here more personal, more relevant," Dor said. "When you stop a bomber, you feel good about yourself."

Dissent against military action is not new to Israel: Military historians note that public discontent with Israel's two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon and its slowly mounting casualty toll helped pressure the government to withdraw its forces in May 2000 -- over the objection of the military leadership.

Opinion polls continue to rate the Israel Defense Forces as the country's most respected institution, though public confidence levels have eroded slightly since the military's incursion into West Bank cities in the spring of 2002. The Israeli news media, including the military's official weekly newspaper, have become more willing to scrutinize an institution once considered sacrosanct.

Many analysts say they see a growing willingness among today's soldiers and officers to not only speak out against the tactics employed in the Palestinian territories, but also to refuse to serve. That, the analysts say, signals an unprecedented challenge to the armed forces and the government.

Israel maintains mandatory military conscription and reserve duty in which eligible men, and some unmarried women, serve about one month each year, usually until age 41, though requirements vary substantially depending on the individual's military specialty. The military is what Michael Oren, a military historian, calls a "neighborhood army," which most Israeli boys and girls grew up knowing they would join. Active-duty and reserve soldiers maintain a fierce dedication to the military, and believe they have an obligation to protect their homeland, as well as the lives of families and friends.

But in dusty camps, at blistering desert roadblocks and, perhaps most frequently, when soldiers go home and take off their uniforms, introspection often blurs the clear outlines of duty.

"You're in a situation where you need to be blind," said Hakkak, the Israeli sergeant, tugging nervously at unruly strands of his brown hair as he discussed his role in the conflict. "You do things as a machine, it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. The things you've done affect you in a very serious way."

Nearly 900 Israelis have been killed during the conflict -- more than 250 of them soldiers. Almost 2,500 Palestinians have been killed. It is difficult to determine how many of those casualties were civilians, with estimates by Palestinian human rights groups and Israeli research groups ranging as high as 85 percent and as low as 48 percent. No verifiable independent count exists, and the Israeli military provides no statistics on Palestinian civilian deaths.

Nearly a year after leaving active duty, Hakkak, who like many soldiers later found work as a security guard, said he was still haunted by his West Bank tour.

"In my dreams I see myself killing people I didn't kill," he said.

An Army's Mystique

Cpl. Mati Milstein was sweaty and bored -- extremely bored, as he recalled. He was halfway through an eight-hour shift at a Gaza Strip checkpoint near a Jewish settlement when he spotted a car approaching. A Palestinian man and his young son were inside.

Milstein, his coffee-colored eyes set in a face that seemed all sharp angles, trained his M-16 rifle on the father and ordered him out of the car. He remembered that the "young son watched in horror."

The soldier peered inside the trunk. The father and his boy were probably returning from the beach and were no security threat, Milstein told himself.

"But I wasn't finished," Milstein later wrote in a Jewish newsletter. "At gunpoint, I ordered the father to open the hood and show me the engine, open the glove compartment, lift up the front seats, crawl into the back and show me whatever was stuck between the rear seats, open his shopping bags, empty his pockets."

Then, with the man's identity card in his pocket, Milstein ambled over to his shaded and fortified checkpost and gossiped with a colleague, keeping his M-16 trained on the father and son, who remained standing under the wilting sun.

"I held them for 20 minutes -- because I could," he recalled. "Then I let them go because I got bored with the game."

Milstein, an American who moved to Israel and joined the army four years ago, said he discussed the incident with no one -- not with fellow soldiers, nor with his parents back in Santa Fe, N.M. "We tend to keep those experiences within us," he explained, echoing the feelings of almost every soldier interviewed. "It's very personal. We might prefer to forget what happened.

"I didn't think about the implications until afterward," said Milstein, whose father is a psychiatrist and mother is a psychologist. "I didn't feel good about what I did -- that I couldn't keep myself from sinking to this."

Last year Milstein decided to tell his story in the newsletter of the Jewish Federation of Greater Albuquerque. Sitting in a Tel Aviv coffee bar with an army buddy on a recent afternoon, he tried to dissect his reasons for taking his personal feelings public.

"There's a mystique about the army -- that we are the most moral army in the world, we only do good things," Milstein said. "But this is what's happening. I think it's important for people to know." He thought it particularly important to tell other Jews because, he said, "they don't really know what's going on."

Today, as a 28-year-old reservist who works for an Israeli Web site, Milstein continues to serve -- reluctantly -- in the Palestinian territories when he receives call-ups.

"There are terrorists stopped and terrorist attacks prevented," he said. "In that respect, there is a very clear purpose and reason for being there. But I don't think we should be there. All the incidents that happen at checkpoints make the Palestinian population hate us more. It counteracts the useful work of tracking suicide bombers. It strengthens the hand of the armed Palestinian groups. It makes it easier for Hamas to justify its attacks on Israelis."

Disobeying Orders

Brig. Gen. Yiftah Spector is one of the most decorated pilots in Israeli history, a triple ace credited with downing 15 enemy planes in wars spanning three decades. In recent years, Spector became a revered flight instructor for the air force. This year alone he spent 47 days on reserve duty and flew 110 times, mostly training cadets and their instructors.

Last month scores of Palestinians were killed or wounded when pilots attempting to kill militant leaders dropped bombs or fired missiles into crowded urban neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip. Spector and 26 other current and former Israeli air force pilots signed a letter stating their opposition to executing "illegal and immoral orders to attack." They refused "to take part in air force strikes in civilian population centers" and "to continue to hurt innocent civilians."

The letter angered many of their commanders, rattled the political establishment and astounded a society that has long considered military pilots to be among the elite. The air force commander, Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz, grounded all the pilots and fired the nine instructors, including Spector, his longtime friend and colleague.

Spector, 63, was undeterred. In an interview a few days after personally surrendering his wings to Halutz, he said: "I am the public. I can speak my heart."

"If we continue, there are going to be greater and great dilemmas and there will be more and more mistakes," said Spector, a sculptor and painter who invented a computerized aircraft flight control system. The government, he said, is "deaf, blind and stupid" for relying exclusively on military force to resolve the conflict.

In addition to the pilots, 567 reserve army officers and soldiers have declared publicly that they will no longer serve in the Palestinian territories, and hundreds of others have quietly asked their commanders for reassignment, according to military lawyers and Israeli military experts.

Many government officials have dismissed the numbers as inconsequential in a military of about 186,000 active-duty and 445,000 reserve troops. Some military analysts disagree.

"This is very significant," said Yagil Levy, author of a recently published book on changing trends in the Israeli military. "For the first time in Israeli history, you're talking about hundreds of officers. They are very prominent officers who served in the IDF in very prominent jobs."

Fear of the Unknown

"My biggest fear is that we get numb," Nadav, a 26-year-old captain, said recently at a shabby Israeli base just outside of Nablus, about 28 miles north of Jerusalem. He sat at a dusty, plastic-covered table in his office, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights and contemplating the impact of this war on his army. Like all officers in the Israeli military, he began service as an enlisted soldier.

Nadav, a compactly built man who took a break to travel the world after his mandatory service and returned to active duty last year, described a trip to Ethiopia. On the first day, he was overwhelmed by the poverty. After a few days, he said, "I didn't see it as much," adding, "I'm afraid that will happen to us. We will start doing things, like taking over a house, and blowing up a door will look natural -- that we'll do stuff and not think about the person, even if he's killed."

Nadav commands a company of about 105 soldiers in the 202nd Paratrooper Battalion. His troops are native Israelis as well as immigrants from across the globe -- 20 from Russia and other former Soviet republics, 10 from Ethiopia, others from Argentina, Britain and, until recently, two from the United States. The unit's members call themselves "the Rattlesnakes."

He refers to them as "my children." He worries about the strain the conflict has put on the unit and his men. Before last year's West Bank incursions, troops usually spent four months in the field and four months training at a rear base. This year, Nadav's men were allotted one month of training and reorganization after 11 months of combat operations.

One night this year at the beginning of a shift, the Rattlesnakes collected in front of an elaborately detailed, computer-projected aerial photograph of Nablus, an ancient city known to most of the men in the room by its Hebrew name of Shechem and revered by Jews as the spot where Abraham received the promise of a land of Israel.

The night's mission was a raid intended to nab a suspected Palestinian militant.

"We know very little," cautioned the deputy commander who gave the briefing. "Name, what he looks like. . . . We don't know where he is. These are the suspected places" -- three houses where intelligence reports indicated the suspect could be spending the night.

Each squad was to leave its armored jeeps or truck at a specific location; each man had a precise rooftop, tree line or alley at which to position himself; each was responsible for knowing the location of his colleagues to reduce the chances of casualties caused by friendly fire.

Soldiers say few operations prey on their psyches more than searches for suspected militants. Sometimes the troops blast through doors with explosives, fearful of the potential danger of armed fighters on the other side. All too frequently, they find Palestinian families cowering in their own houses.

"One time we went into a house . . . really, really aggressively," said a 22-year-old first sergeant, Gabriel, whose copper-colored hair sprouted from beneath a maroon skullcap emblazoned with the emblem of the paratroops. "The people were really scared. The people were shaking. Not just the women -- the father, all of them were shaking." It was the wrong house.

"I really, really, really felt bad," said Gabriel, who said he watched Walt Disney movies to relax on his weekends at home. "If it's a terrorist, you don't feel as bad. I really felt bad. I couldn't stop apologizing. There was nothing I could do. I'm a simple soldier."

Noam, the 20-year-old first sergeant, spent his youth in Israel, moved to England with his family and returned nearly three years ago to serve in the armed forces. In those three years, he said, he has lost count of how many Palestinian homes he has raided.

"You feel sorry for the family," said the lanky soldier with short black hair. "They have done nothing wrong. . . . You think of what it would be like if someone came to your family."

"A person not in the army might think you should get out of the occupied territories," said Noam, watching two Rattlesnakes play a heated game of table tennis as they waited for the night's mission to begin. "But by being here, you know you stopped a potential murderer. That's the only satisfaction."

His soft voice drifted off: "Even that's not too much satisfaction. It's a war. No one likes this."

Source: Washington Post