man tapped his partner who was covering the other direction and they ran down a narrow alleyway opposite Abed’s front door.
A moment later he heard more running in the direction the men had come from, and he instinctively closed his door and carefully drew the bolt across without making a noise. There was a roar of engines and the sound of masonry crumbling; one of the buildings behind Abed’s home had gone down. Then many footsteps charged past his front door and gunfire erupted, followed by shouts in Hebrew. Everyone in the camp would be wide awake by now. Families would be huddled together in fear, praying their door would be passed by, that they would be among the lucky ones tonight.
A helicopter roared overhead drowning out all other sounds. Abed froze in the darkness as the helicopter’s searchlight shone through gaps in the corrugated roof above the front door sending shafts of light across his face. As the helicopter moved on, a voice speaking in Arabic came over a hand-held loudspeaker.
‘This is the IDF. All men from the age of fourteen to sixty come out of your homes with your hands raised!’
Abed was immediately filled with concern. The last time a callout happened in his neighbourhood he was eighteen. He had been made to line up along with a dozen other men, a few older but mostly his age or younger, and they were searched and ordered to remove their shoes. Several boys were slapped about, two beaten quite severely for not co-operating quickly enough, but Abed had received little more than a few shoves, the most severe one accompanying his dismissal when he was pulled away from the wall, pushed up the street and told to go home immediately without looking back or he would be shot. He obeyed them to the letter. The IDF, the Israeli Defence Force, was not to be trifled with.They were ruthless jailors, without compassion, and punished severely those who did not obey them, and just as often those who did.The rules of Gaza at night were the rules of the jungle, and the IDF had all the teeth and claws.
The loudspeaker’s message was repeated over and over in all directions. Abed remained behind his front door unsure what to do. If he went outside he feared it would be different this time. He was a man now and adults were often beaten and nearly always taken away and interrogated, which usually lasted a couple of days. He still had a lot to do to get his new metal shop ready to open for business, with supplies due to be delivered in the morning, which he had to be there to receive. But if he did not go outside and the IDF decided to search his home, he might be shot or accused of colluding with terrorists.The latter meant immediate imprisonment without trial for God only knew how long. Some men had been gone for years without even being charged. But compliance did not ensure safety either. There were endless stories of men, and also boys, who had left their homes as ordered in just such a situation, and been shot or beaten and left for dead.The least Abed could expect was to be half-stripped and taken to a holding area, or driven to another part of the Strip and left to find his own way back without money for food or transport. Being beaten was inevitable. It would be down to the mood of the troops as to how badly. If one of their own had been killed recently then it did not bode well for anyone. Resistance was out of the question, and to defend one’s home was to die as a terrorist. Many Palestinians had guns but few who lived in the camps. The most common was the AK47 but some had M16s, and there was even the occasional British GPMG, a heavier belt-fed machine gun. But guns were expensive in Gaza.
Ironically, most of the weapons smuggled in were not from other Arab countries, which in truth gave little support to the Palestinians. The Palestinians bought their weapons from the Israelis themselves, the so-called Israeli Mafia mostly; they passed through the settlements to be sold by the settlers themselves, the very people the guns might be used against. An AK47 could cost from three to five thousand US dollars, making Palestine the most inflated weapons’ market in the world - in Baghdad an AK47 could be picked up for as