Search and Destroy in Gaza

If you had to search for a missing person, few places in the world would be more forbidding than the sandy 28-mile-long sliver of land known as the Gaza Strip. Its cities are a chaotic maze of dusty alleyways lined by warrens of crumbling buildings that each seem indistinguishable from the next. The 1.4 million people who live there make it the most densely populated patch of land on earth. At times, the streets and souks can become a suffocating crush of human congestion. And the task of finding a lost soul is made more hazardous by the long-held air of suspicion and gangs of gunmen ready to open fire on outsiders who tread on their turf.

Somewhere in that inhospitable landscape, Corporal Gilad Shalit, 19, a soldier in the Israeli army, awaited his fate last week. Abducted by Palestinian militants at an army post in Israel and smuggled into Gaza on June 25, he might not have known that his captivity had set off a furious Israeli campaign to try to save him--and in the process, propelled both sides to the brink of full-scale warfare. While surveillance drones buzzed overhead, some 7,000 troops, 80 Israeli tanks and 180 armored personnel carriers massed at the border with Gaza, territory Israel evacuated less than a year ago. The Israelis seized Gaza's dilapidated airport to prevent Shalit's kidnappers from moving him out, with units ready to mount a rescue raid if Israeli intelligence or its informants picked up word of Shalit's whereabouts. Had the offensive stopped there, it might have seemed to most people a defensibly legitimate, if extraordinarily intense, operation for a single soldier's life.

But it didn't stop there. Whatever support the Israelis had for the mission was undermined by the lead-footed way in which it was carried out. In the first days of the operation, Israeli warplanes wrecked three bridges and several roads inside Gaza. The F-16s overhead repeatedly broke the sound barrier, producing thunderous sonic booms on the ground. Most shocking was Israel's destruction of all six transformers at Gaza's central power plant, cutting off electricity to 45% of the territory's inhabitants. Israeli officials insisted they took such measures to aid in the hunt for Shalit, but few Palestinians believed it. In their eyes, the Israeli assault on Gaza's basic infrastructure had less to do with finding the missing soldier than inflicting collective punishment. "We have learned from past experience that Israel uses the opportunity to implement scenarios and schemes it has," says Rafiq Husseini, chief of staff to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "It's obviously not about one soldier."