GAZA CITY — The reality of the Gaza Strip, it appears, is in the eye of the beholder.
Some officers of the Israel Defense Forces and the Palestinian Authority security organizations think it’s a simmering cauldron bound, sooner or later, to boil over.
Others call it a model of how Israelis and Palestinians can live adjacent but separate lives.
While it’s the center of a burgeoning cottage industry of arms-building and smuggling, Gaza has produced no suicide bombers, Israeli security sources say, because a fence around the area prevents bombers from crossing into Israel.
For its part, the Palestinian Authority is searching wildly for ways to include rejectionist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad — which are strongest in the Gaza Strip — without having to confront them in armed clashes.
Meanwile, Israel nervously awaits the end of the three-month hudna, or cease-fire, that the main Palestinian terrorist groups have declared. The cease-fire is due to expire in late September — at which time, as one IDF officer put it, “the real show begins.”
Hamas is using the cover of the cease-fire to build an arsenal of 1,000 Kassam rockets that can fly a greater distance and carry a warhead, says a senior IDF officer.
That has sparked concern that if hostilities resume, “the opening of the next phase in the conflict will be more violent,” an IDF brigade commander in Gaza said.
The materials to assemble the rockets are reportedly smuggled beneath the Egyptian border through tunnels underneath Rafah, the major city in the southern Gaza Strip. From there, the senior IDF officer said, the weapons and bomb components are driven north along Tancher Road (the strip’s main north-south axis, which recently was reopened to Palestinian traffic) to Khan Yunis or Gaza City.
There, according to the senior officer, Hamas is working on a new version of the Kassam that could reach about 10 to 12 miles, putting cities like Ashkelon and Netivot within range.
Some of the tunnels are believed to lie as much as 80 yards underground. “Unfortunately, their digging of tunnels is much faster than our ability to stop it,” the senior officer said.
In the “road map” for peace, Israel is demanding that the Palestinian Authority disarm the terrorist groups, destroy the Kassam lathes and arrest militants. For years Israel has said that the Palestinian security forces are strong enough to do the job.
That perception increasingly is being challenged, however. Asked whether the balance of weapons in the Gaza Strip tilts towards the rejectionist groups or the Palestinian Authority, one IDF brigade commander hesitated for a moment, then noted that — given the accelerated weapons smuggling believed to be under way during the cease-fire — the rejectionist groups might well achieve the upper hand.
For months, Israeli security sources have said that the Palestinian Authority has some 20,000 security personnel in the Gaza Strip alone. “They are armed, have enough jeeps and cars, enough ammunition and enough courts to arrest those men and take them to court,” the senior army officer said.
In private, though, IDF officials quote figures closer to those given by Palestinian security chiefs — perhaps 12,000 men under arms. Many of them are not nearly as motivated as their counterparts in Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aksa Brigades.
Pressed by reporters, the IDF brigade level commander — who works closely with his Palestinian counterparts in the field — admitted that, in an all-out battle, the Palestinian Authority might lose to the terrorist groups.
“The P.A. is aware of this,” he said, “and so the challenge for the Palestinians is to disarm the militant groups peacefully. The P.A. believes that it can only resolve” the issue “by including Hamas in government.”
The Palestinian Auithority’s National Security Service, or NSS, the apparatus tasked with disarming Hamas and Islamic Jihad, is aware of the challenge.
“It’s impossible to disarm Hamas,” said Brig. Gen. Sa’eb Ajez of the NSS. “We can understand that they don’t want a solution” to the conflict with Israel, “but our chronic weakness is the question of how to disarm or arrest them, especially in the past two years.”
Yet Ajez did what he felt were positive developments: The deal that Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas negotiated with Hamas and Jihad stipulated that the Palestinian Authority would not actively hunt militants, but would work to prevent attacks.
“More than that, there is little we can do,” Ajez said.
At least the cease-fire has brought some respite for Palestinian motorists who now are able to travel on the Tancher road without being detained for hours at checkpoints, Ajez said. And more farmers now can reach their fields, though they still fear being mistaken for militants, Ajez said.
The most startling development is occurring in towns next to Gaza’s border with Israel: In Rafah last week, Ajez said, local residents pummeled terrorists who were attempting to set up a mortar to fire into Israel. Mortar attacks often bring an Israeli military response against the launching area.
For now, a tenuous coexistence reigns in the strip.