At Checkpoint in Gaza, Travelers Wait and Wait
The trucks and cars wait in a chaotic, mile-long line, their Palestinian drivers jostling for any small space that opens in front of them.

The worn two-lane road on which they sit is the main highway of the Gaza Strip, running from Israel in the north to Egypt in the south. There was a time not long ago when that drive took less than an hour.

Now it can take an entire day, or even longer. Just how long is impossible to predict.

Since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, the Israeli Army has clamped down steadily on the movement of Palestinians within and outside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials describe the Palestinians' hardships as unfortunate but say they are unavoidable in the effort to protect Israeli citizens and soldiers from attacks, including suicide bombings, that have taken hundreds of lives.

In the West Bank, some Palestinian cities and towns have become isolated enclaves, surrounded by troops and tanks. But the restrictions are nowhere felt more sharply than by the 1.3 million people of the Gaza Strip, which has been effectively cut in half and sometimes into thirds by checkpoints set up in large part to safeguard the travel of Gaza's 7,100 Jewish settlers.

"This is a way for them to demonstrate hour by hour that they are masters over our lives," said a leading human rights advocate in Gaza, Raji Sourani. "People think of Gaza as liberated. But the Israelis can make our lives as miserable as ever."

To spend a hot, dusty day at the Abu Houli checkpoint is to hear of endless problems it has brought — families divided and jobs lost, sick people kept from their doctors and fish rotting on its way to market.

It is also to witness how the demands of Israeli settlers, concerns for Israeli security and a sense of humiliation among Palestinians feed the Middle East conflict day by day.

The security advantages the checkpoints might afford are lost on the thousands of Gazans who line up each day at Abu Houli and the others. To them, the equation is painfully simple: the settlers zip back and forth in their late-model cars while the Palestinians wait.

Standing on the new bridge, looking down through field glasses on the traffic backed up at Abu Houli, General Almog seemed to have no trouble making out the anger and despair festering below.

"The Palestinian citizens suffer very much from this situation," General Almog said as he stood in a flak jacket, flanked by a pair of army snipers. "They are imprisoned. But there must be a balance between the factors that affect the Palestinian population and the security of the Israeli citizens."

That balance seemed to be especially hard to discern from behind the checkpoint.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/12/international/middleeast/12GAZA.html