In Gaza Strip, life is worse under self-rule

Tomato prices tripled, but ammunition costs dropped.
TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL
GAZA CITY -- Life was always hard here for Subhiyah Nassar and her six children -- so bad that she never believed it could get worse.
Residents of the Gaza Strip endured a lot during the often brutal, 38-year Israeli occupation. One of most densely populated stretches of earth anywhere, it is also one of the poorest and the most violent.
When the Israelis left this summer, however, life was supposed to get better. Nassar's family joined the rest of Gaza for several days of exhilarating celebrations in September, hailing the long-awaited withdrawal of Israel's soldiers and settlers from this tiny finger of land. Life, most believed, was about to get better.
Somehow, things deteriorated. Two months into Gaza's groundbreaking experiment with something approaching self-rule, it's hard to find anyone who will say their life has improved, and impossible to find much excitement about the ballyhooed deal brokered last week by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that will see Gaza's border with Egypt opened for the first time since the Israeli pullout.
A failing economy, an explosion in inter-Palestinian violence and actions by the same Israeli military that was supposed to have left have combined to almost entirely snuff out the optimism of just eight weeks ago.
"We were extremely happy when the Israelis left; we were feeling hopeful. My cousin, who lives near Netzarim [a former Jewish settlement in central Gaza] slaughtered a bull in celebration," Nassar said, sitting in the living room of her family's home in the Beach refugee camp.
She was just 10 years old when the Israeli army arrived in 1967 and had come to believe that when the Israelis left, many of Gaza's problems would also disappear. "But Gaza is just a big prison now ... Life is more difficult than before. We're bored with poverty."
Outgunned police
One of her two sons is a member of the embattled Palestinian police corps, a force he freely admits is incapable of maintaining basic law and order in the streets and that is outnumbered and outgunned by Islamic militant groups such as Hamas. Her other son is an engineering student thankful that he's attending the university that remains open and not the one shut by violence.
Of her four daughters, one of the two old enough to get married and move out has moved back in because neither she nor her husband can find enough work to feed their family. And her youngest, 11-year-old Naheel, had the windows of her school blown out by the sonic boom from what Israel describes as a mock air raid. She's now terrified to sit in class.
Medics here say such sonic booms -- a tactic Israel also uses in the skies over Lebanon -- are responsible for a more than 30 percent surge in the number of miscarriages last month.
Palestinians talked brashly this summer of building a Mediterranean paradise once the Israelis finally left. Instead, the Gaza Strip has, improbably, slid further into the abyss.
In a sign of how far awry things have gone in that time, the price of tomatoes has nearly tripled since the Israeli withdrawal, while the price of ammunition has plummeted. "Supply and demand," shrugs Haitham, Nassar's 25-year-old policeman son. "The wealthiest people in Gaza are the arms smugglers and dealers."
Threats close university
The near-deserted campus of al-Azhar University is another silent testament to Gaza's failures.
Adnan al-Khaldi, the university's president, was holding his weekly meeting of faculty heads when 50 gunmen, all affiliated with the ruling Fatah movement, burst in and dragged him out onto the street.
The militants, most from a single Gaza family, were furious that one of the university's deans had disciplined a relative for bad behavior and that al-Khaldi, an unassuming chemistry professor, had upheld the ruling. They threatened him with death and warned him never to return to his own school.
The university closed the next day and has not reopened since. Despite the fact the university sits directly across the street from the prosecutor's office, al-Khaldi, who can name many of his assailants, has been unable to get anyone to investigate the matter, let alone arrest those involved.
"We have no security, no stability. We cannot plan for our work or for our families," al-Khaldi said. "I'm truly afraid, not just for my own personal safety ... I am worried about my children, about the futures of the 14,000 students of this university."
The chaos has been compounded by the feeling that the Israelis, for all the fanfare surrounding their withdrawal, didn't go very far and have no intention of letting the Palestinians run their own affairs.