AFTER another sleepless night of terrifying Israeli bombardment in her battered Gaza neighborhood, Um Mohammed was at the end of her tether. “We are scared to death, but where should we go? Does fighting Hamas mean wiping out Gaza?” the mother of five asked. In the thick of a 19-day-old blitz that Israel says is meant to deter Hamas fighters from firing rockets at it, Palestinians focused on survival find it hard to contemplate what lies ahead. “A future for Gaza?” Um Mohammed queried, taken aback at the question. “Listen, my son is five- years-old. He will carry these images in his mind forever. Will he ever believe in peace?” So does anyone have a vision for Gaza's 1.5 million people, squeezed between Israel, Egypt and the sea, once the war stops?The densely populated, 45-km -long strip has seen plenty of misery since refugees uprooted from their land in what is now Israel swarmed into it during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. After Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war, it seethed under occupation until the 1993 Oslo peace accords sparked brief hope for progress toward Palestinian statehood. For a few years Gaza's economy saw some growth. Optimists dreamed it could become a new Singapore on the Mediterranean. All that crumbled in the Israeli-Palestinian violence that erupted in 2000 after the collapse of US-led peace talks. Israel's abrupt unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 only emphasized its physical separation from the occupied West Bank. Israeli border controls kept its people penned in.
