Inside the Hurricane

Two

blasts shatter the chill midnight. The sleepy Israeli soldiers throw down their cigarettes and rush to their heavy machine guns. There's a third percussion and then a fourth from the homemade grenades hurled at "Termite" post by Palestinians at the edge of the Rafah refugee camp. 2nd Lieut. Sama'ana Owdeh stares at the infrared screen linked to Termite's rooftop surveillance camera. He directs the camera at one cinder-block house, then another. His eyes twitch with tension and concentration. "You see them?" he barks to the men at their guns. Another grenade explodes, louder and nearer, and this time a machine gun fires too--at the post. "That's very close!" Owdeh shouts. The Israeli machine guns open up a brief, deafening volley. But their target has retreated. In the nervous silence, a soldier speaks up. "It's quiet, too quiet." The Israelis know this won't last. "There's no quiet here," Owdeh mutters. "In this place, there's no such thing."

Silence in Rafah is only the momentary stillness at the heart of a hurricane, and the storm is the Aqsa intifadeh. For almost 17 months, the Palestinian uprising and Israel's harsh reaction to it have ravaged both sides of the Green Line, which separates Israel from the Palestinian territories. This town of 135,000 at the southern end of the Gaza Strip is the epicenter, where the intifadeh's ill effects are fiercest. There is no worse place to be an Israeli soldier; nowhere is it harder to live as a Palestinian.

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The math is ugly. Israeli soldiers have endured 13 roadside bombs, 140 shootings and 920 grenades here in the past four months alone. In the Palestinian town, the toll of the intifadeh stands at 84 dead, 1,160 wounded and 240 homes demolished. Yet Rafah's devastation goes largely unnoticed. Because the town lies beyond a series of time-consuming and often dangerous Israeli checkpoints, few Jerusalem-based foreign correspondents or even Palestinian reporters working out of Gaza City get to Rafah. In Rafah, dead men and destroyed homes are mere footnotes to news roundups.

Mohammed Najjar, 27, cleans the mud floor of his tent, one of three dozen pitched along Rafah's main street. It has been his home since last month, when Israeli troops bulldozed his house in Block O, the section of the refugee camp next to Termite. With a rake, Najjar gathers cigarette butts and candy wrappers swept into the tent by the downpour of the past few hours. "It's cold in here, isn't it?" he says.

Rafah sits along the border with Egypt, so Palestinians dig tunnels to smuggle in cigarettes, hashish, baby formula--and arms. Israeli troops try to find the tunnels and shut them down. To divert the soldiers while the smugglers dig, Palestinians launch nightly assaults on Termite from Block O. Israel, in turn, tries to make Termite safer by bulldozing nearby homes, like Najjar's.

The tunnel action is shared by a few Rafah clans. The stretch of border by Block O is tunneled by the Shouarahs; the Akhras clan digs beneath Block J. Most tunnels are terrifyingly narrow--2 ft. by 2 ft.--built without supports, and increasingly long, airless and dangerous. You would have to be desperate to claw your way through the earth like this. But with unemployment at 65%, Rafah isn't short of despairing men. The tunnels are their best hope. "This town would be a disaster if you couldn't smuggle across the border," says Fayez, a bootlegger who declines to give his full name. "At least people here can turn to that when things get bad."

For Termite's Israeli garrison, it gets bad at night. The soldiers are at their most vulnerable as they rumble 20 min. along the muddy road in an armored personnel carrier to their post. On a recent night, two grenades exploded near a cramped APC that was transporting TIME reporters into Termite. The isolated clutch of soldiers fought off a series of attacks through the night while 22 more grenades exploded outside. Termite's paramedic, Lior Raviv, says the troops feel "very exposed."

At dawn, Raviv brushes the outpost's floor to remove cigarette butts, spent machine-gun cartridges and the dirt that has blown in through the rifle slits. Not far away, Najjar will be raking out his tent after another night. In Rafah they sweep up the intifadeh's filth and wait for more grime to fall on them.