It was a clear day in Gaza. A blue sky. A cool breeze off the blue sea rustled fronds in the palm orchards. A virtual paradise to a visitor driving through.
“Everything is quiet,” an Israel Defense Force senior officer said early Wednesday morning. “But there is a smell of tension in the air,” he added.
It is the pungent smell of burning tires and of tear gas.
Driving from Gaza military headquarters down the main street, Omar el-Mukhtar, a reporter’s car was pelted with stones. When this happens there is no making a U-turn. One must step on the accelerator and keep on driving, hoping the stones will hit the body of the car and miss the windows.
This time, luckily, they missed.
Around the corner from Falastin Square, the center of Gaza, soldiers forced passers-by to clean away the debris of burned tires that were an improvised roadblock only a few minutes before. The soldiers were visibly bored.
“This is an everyday scene,” one of them said. The roadblock had been intended to cut the main traffic artery between the city and the southern Gaza Strip. But that hardly bothered anyone.
Hours passed and nothing special happened. At the end of the day the military would issue a statement saying “relative calm” prevailed in the Gaza Strip.
When they speak of “relative calm,” the military spokespersons mean there were no major clashes between the soldiers and the local population resulting in casualties.
But calm is hardly the word to describe the situation in Gaza. The Palestinian uprising is far from ended.
Most shops in Gaza were closed. Many Arab workers stayed away from their jobs in Israel. The only business activity was in the downtown marketplace. Even there, the transactions were furtive and hasty, as if everything could be shut down in minutes.
At 2 in the afternoon, prayers of the Ramadan holiday were over. The Shati refugee camp, on the shores of the Mediterranean, came to life.
At first, everything seemed normal. Traffic moved briskly along Nasser Street on the eastern perimeter of the camp.
Then a group of youngsters gathered at the street corner, each armed with a large stone, waiting for action. The youths piled bricks on the road to stop or slow down vehicles.
The first vehicle was a police van, which broke through the barrier, its occupants shooting into the air. Then came an army truck. The soldiers fired tear gas.
But the youths were not deterred. They faced the soldiers, provoking them, shouting insults in Hebrew. “Come on, you maniacs,” though not typical, was one of the few printable taunts.
The soldiers were deliberately slow, almost lethargic in their reaction. They massed their forces and then, almost strolling, firing an occasional burst of tear gas, they backed the youths toward the camp entrance.
WELL-REHEARSED ROLES
The confrontation lasted about two hours. It was as if both sides were actors in a play, each performing a well-rehearsed role. It was hard to imagine that at any moment the situation could become one of life or death.
The soldiers forced the young Palestinians to march in front of them as they entered the refugee camp — protection against the stones in the hands of the camp residents.
Quiet was restored at the camp by evening and the military would again come up with its favorite phrase — “relative calm.”
On this day, it meant that only two people were slightly injured in clashes with Israel Defense Force units in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.
Eastward, in the West Bank, two residents of Silwad village, in the Judean hills, were slightly wounded. A girl was slightly wounded in Nablus. No one was killed.
It was a quiet day. And tomorrow, maybe there would be another.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
