As you walk down rutted, unpaved El Bahr Street towards the Mediterranean, the bullet holes in the walls become more numerous. Petrol barrels filled with sand block the end of side streets, as they did in civil-war Beirut. Soon there are shell holes, windows with jagged glass. Metal shutters clang in the wind. Cement staircases end in mid-air. Then there is only rubble: acres of broken concrete blocks and torn corrugated steel; scraps of fabric caught in debris, crushed fruit boxes, crockery, plastic chairs; electrical wires whipping madly. I watch four men extract a refrigerator from the wreckage and load it onto a donkey cart.
In Palestine, any possession is too precious to be abandoned.
This desolate neighbourhood is the most dangerous frontline between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, a part of Khan Younis refugee camp known as Hay Tuffah - the "apple quarter". Its few remaining inhabitants aren't sure why the Israelis called it that, but they've watched helplessly as the Israelis have destroyed more than 60 homes here since the second Intifada started 15 months ago.
A few tents are pitched on the moonscape. "They burned my house down," Haja Abdel-Looz (55) tells me at a "martyr's" funeral. "I live in a tent in Tuffah and I'll stay there. They think they're going to do what they did in 1948, but we won't let them. Sharon wants to send us to the Arab countries, but we were here before Sharon."
Due west of Hay Tuffah, the white-painted, red-roofed houses of the Israeli settlement of Neve Dekalim shimmer like a mirage amid coconut palms. Even Palestinians who oppose suicide bombings in Israel consider the settlers an occupying force and a legitimate target. But the settlers are well-protected. They have started building a 30-foot concrete and steel wall between Neve Dekalim and the Palestinian refugee camp. The Kalashnikovs that the Palestinians fire from the ruins at the end of El Bahr Street don't have the range to hit Neve Dekalim, but sometimes a mortar is lobbed into the settlement. The Israelis target water-tanks on rooftops, knowing how difficult it is for the Palestinians to replace them. With increasing frequency, Israeli tanks come into Hay Tuffah, firing shells and heavy machine guns, and bulldozing more houses.
The Palestinians fight back. Ra'ed (35), a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, points at a crater at the end of El Bahr Street. "They brought seven tanks in one night to raze some houses," he says. "I planted a bomb there. We made it ourselves with a battery, explosives, wire and a switch. A guy waits in a house with the detonator, and the spotter calls him on the cellphone." The Israeli tank had to be towed away.
Ahmad (17) keeps an eye on three Israeli army pillboxes and a Merkava tank a few hundred metres to the northwest. We slip through back alleys, clamber over chunks of former houses until we reach the no-man's land facing the Israelis. Ahmed points at a dead branch protruding from two boulders. "There! You see the tree? That was my house. It had seven rooms. These were good houses, made from bricks. We live in misery, real misery."
On November 20th, Amnesty International reported to the UN committee on torture that "more than 500 houses have been destroyed in the occupied territories in a year, making at least 2,000 Palestinians homeless, the majority of them children". The Israelis blow up houses in retaliation for shooting or to deprive Palestinian fighters of cover for attacking occupation troops and settlements. The result is the steady enlargement of the occupied zones - and the constant shrinking of Palestinian areas. "Nothing can justify these hundreds of human tragedies," concluded Amnesty.
The destruction creates vocations for suicide bombers. Ahmad, my guide through the ruins of Hay Tuffah, joined the Al Quds Brigade - the armed wing of Islamic Jihad - when the Intifada started. Several of his brothers have also joined Al Quds, or Hamas's more deadly Izzedin Qassem Brigade. What does it mean to be a member? "I march in martyrs' funerals," Ahmad explains. "I distribute leaflets and put up posters of martyrs. I make announcements on the loudspeaker. And I'm ready to put a belt on. I think they won't accept me yet, because they want good believers."
The "belt" Ahmed refers to is a belt of explosives, like those which killed 35 Israelis in suicide attacks in Jerusalem, Haifa and the West Bank this month.
"It is my duty to fight Israel," he says. "I'm bigger than the others - there are kids of 14 or 15 who've become martyrs. When I tell my mother that I'm ready to put the belt on, she says: 'Calm down. Stay here with your brothers.' But I've talked it over with them and they agree. My mother will be happy when she knows I'm a martyr - especially if I kill a lot of Israelis."
Ahmad's younger brothers and sisters are terrified by the nightly explosions. "But me, on the contrary, when I hear shelling, my morale rises and I hate the Israelis even more. I want to put on a belt and avenge the children they killed here."
He mentions four-month-old Iman Hajou, killed by a tank shell in Khan Younis last May. And five Palestinian schoolboys killed on November 22nd by a roadside bomb the Israelis planted in Khan Younis. He claims the world paid more attention to the nine-month-old daughter of settlers killed by a Palestinian sniper in Hebron in April. "The settlers from Neve Dekalim came and threw stones at us after she died," Ahmad adds.
Most of Hay Tuffah's inhabitants are now refugees within the Khan Younis refugee camp. Like Ahmad, they sleep in relatives' homes, or in mosques or the local hospital. About 1,000 have moved less than a kilometre away, to al-Nemsawi ("the Austrian quarter"), built with aid from the Austrian government. But al-Nemsawi also faces the Gush Katif settlement complex, of which Neve Dekalim is a part, and it is beginning to resemble Hay Tuffah.
Fadl Abu Obeid is what Ahmad aspires to be - a "martyr" - though he killed no Israelis when he died. On the evening of December 12th, Israeli helicopter gunships fired missiles at Palestinians who had gathered out of doors, pursuing 21-year-old Fadl and his friend, Yasser Abu Namous, as they ran towards Khan Younis. Four men in their 20s were killed, and 28 other people were wounded.
On the day of Fadl's death, I climb to the fifth-floor apartment where his family have lived as squatters since the Israelis razed their house in Hay Tuffah in mid-November. His mother Rayga (50) sits on a mattress on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, her head thrown back against the wall. She was looking for a bride for Fadl when he was murdered. Rayga is unable to move or talk, and relatives brush flies from her face.
Her daughter Rania (12) tells me calmly how she spent five days in hospital after inhaling tear-gas on her way home from school. Another brother was shot in the chest at the beginning of the Intifada, but survived.
The Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) has 11,500 students and claims 15 "martyrs" since the beginning of the Intifada. When I asked how many of the 15 were suicide bombers, an argument ensued in Arabic between university administrators and students. Two prominent Hamas figures teach at IUG and they feared that I would portray the university as a training-ground for suicide bombers. They made no distinction between martyrs killed by gunfire or bombardments, and those who blow themselves up in crowds of Israeli civilians, the head of public relations said curtly.
On December 16th, Yasser Arafat pleaded for a halt to suicide bombings. Israel and the US have made their cessation the condition for resuming negotiations. But opinion polls show 70 per cent of Palestinians now support suicide bombings - and a comparable proportion of Israelis support Sharon's violent, collective punishment as retaliation. I've heard westernised, secular Palestinians argue that the suicide attacks are necessary, because Israelis will ignore the catastrophe in the occupied territories as long as Israel itself is safe. "What about our civilians? What about the women and children the Israelis kill?" one asks me.
Humiliation is a major factor in the explosive mixture of poverty and despair that produces suicide bombers. In central Gaza on December 5th, the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, reported that six Palestinians were forced to strip to their underwear and march back and forth in the rain in front of an Israeli army check-point. The IDF claimed it suspected the men carried explosives; none were found. One of the men was sent back - still in his underwear - to retrieve the clothes before the six were arrested and driven away in a jeep. A soldier dragged the clothes through the mud before ordering the men to get dressed again.
"Of the 200 or 300 people backed up at the checkpoint, at least one must have decided then to become a suicide bomber," says Dr Eyad E l-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist.
Not all "martyrs" are Islamic fundamentalists. In the bombed-out ruins of their headquarters next to Arafat's presidential palace, an officer in the naval police told me that one of his friends, a 31-year-old major with a degree in engineering, Medhat Abu Dallal, had been crushed by an Israeli tank at Sudaniyeh, northern Gaza. Abu Dallal's widow tells me her husband's colleagues had seen a remotely-piloted robot bang his head against the ground until it split open. I ask the Israeli Defence Forces to comment. They say that Abu Dallal and his patrol "looked suspicious", "carried weapons" and "were not supposed to be in the area".
Local children show me where the bodies were found, on a sandy knoll more than one kilometre south of the Dugit settlement. Israeli tanks make illegal incursions there every night; the area is criss-crossed by fresh tank tracks.
Abu Dallal and his colleagues appear to have been planting a roadside bomb when Israeli occupation troops spotted them on the night of November 18th. Four tanks came across the valley from Dugit, firing shells. Abu Dallal and another naval policeman, Mohamed Ibrahim, were wounded. Five others escaped. It is not clear when or how Abu Dallal and Ibrahim died.
The Palestinians claim Ibrahim was summarily executed and that Abu Dallal was deliberately mutilated. "I saw two bodies and one Kalashnikov," says Ali al-Attar, a 12-year-old boy who lives near the knoll. "One of them was dead; I didn't see any marks on him. The other one was broken into pieces."
The boy's voice falters and his eyes fill with tears. "The Israelis still come every night. Since the two martyrs were killed, we don't play here any more. We're afraid."
Abu Dallal's widow, Kifaa (20), lives in a cold apartment in the Nasser district of Gaza City. The couple's second daughter, Raghad, was 10 days old when her father died. Sixteen-month-old Rihan was dressed up for the Muslim feast of al-Fitr, like a doll in her white fake-fur coat and hat. "There is no future for Palestine," Kifaa tells me. Abu Dallal died on his second wedding anniversary. His family had tried to arrange a marriage with another woman, but he went on hunger strike to convince their parents.
"One of the last things he did was to buy me a bottle of perfume," Kifaa says. "That night, I sensed something was wrong. I kept calling his cellphone, and it never answered."
As an officer in Yasser Arafat's security forces, Abu Dallal was not supposed to fight the Israelis. "He told me he was against attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on civilians," Kifaa says. "But he supported resistance against the Israeli army."
Abu Dallal's "martyrdom" and the popular perception of two children killed by the Israelis explain why the Intifada cannot easily be stopped now. The first was 12-year-old Mohamed al-Durrah, shot dead by the Israeli army as he clung in terror to his father under a hail of bullets at the Netzarim junction on October 4th, 2000. The second, Fares Oday (13), challenged an Israeli tank with a stone three weeks later.
As the months passed, Fares Oday's poster took precedence on the walls of Gaza. Al- Durrah is still famous, but his image is rarely seen. After 34 years of occupation, the Palestinians no longer accept the role of frightened, passive victims.