Gaza's shattered dreams

The airport stands empty, closed since the intifada began

By the BBC's Caroline Hawley in Gaza

The Monte Carlo of the Middle East... that was how a Palestinian from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction once imagined the Gaza Strip with peace.

Everything's just going backwards... We don't want Israel and we don't want the Palestinian Authority. It has done nothing for us

Palestinian man

And the words kept ringing in my ears as I drove around Gaza, eight years after that confident prediction - made in a first flush of euphoria after Israel and the Palestinians reached an interim peace deal in Oslo in 1993.

Others touted Gaza as a future Singapore.

Peace talks collapsed

A lot has changed in the Middle East since 1993.

Yasser Arafat has returned from exile and installed himself in Gaza along with thousands of security men from at least 12 different forces.

But peace negotiations that the Palestinians hoped would deliver them a state have collapsed.

And a year of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has now claimed nearly 1,000 lives, the vast majority of them Palestinian.

"Everything's just going backwards," one middle-aged man told me. "We're all running after the next loaf of bread. We don't want Israel and we don't want the Palestinian authority. It's done nothing for us."

Cigarettes

At first glance, Gaza looks pretty much as it did back then before the 1993 peace deal.

Yasser Arafat returned from exile

There may be new traffic lights in Gaza city, but the main change seemed to be the cigarette adverts along the main road into the Gaza Strip.

Winston Lights, Viceroy "The Taste of America" and the famous Marlboro horses - sleek and shiny beside the scrawny real-life Gazan horses heaving loads of vegetables.

Gaza may be poor, but a people who live on their nerves must look like a lucrative market for cigarette manufacturers.

Reminders of conflict

We drove down the Gaza coastline. Gentle waves lapped at the beach, as the familiar smell of the open sewers of Shati refugee camp wafted towards us.

Then a sudden reminder of the past few months of conflict - the prefabricated buildings of what is meant to become Gaza's new port. Funded by the European Union, it was all but flattened by Israeli army bulldozers in September.

Gaza International Airport, opened amid much fanfare in 1998, is still standing - all traditional Arab arches, cream-coloured paint and mirror windows.

The Israelis are strangling us

Palestinian airport worker

The workers are still turning up for their shifts, but no planes now fly either in or out of it.

Gaza's gleaming airport stands as a kind of absurd symbol of Palestinians' thwarted aspirations.

A screen shows a Royal Jordanian flight due to leave - on schedule - at 1700 to Amman, from Gate 1.

There is a flight to Morocco from Gate 2, and a flight to Cairo from Gate 3.

"We just want to be sure the system is working," a senior official with Palestinian Airways tells me.

Flight ban

The Israelis have not allowed Gaza airport to function since last November, two months after the Palestinian uprising erupted.

Plastered to the wall of the main departure hall are colour photographs of local Palestinians, from southern Gaza, who have died over the past few months - including 3 or 4 airport workers.

Buildings have been flattened by Israeli tanks

Some are suicide bombers, others bystanders caught up in the fighting.

A booth nearby belongs to the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

It is closed, of course, but there are picture-postcard posters on the outside: the Roman ruins at Sabastiya, near the West Bank town of Nablus; the mosque of Abraham in Hebron, another intifada hotspot; and a dreamy picture of Gaza - the silhouettes of two fishermen bringing in their nets at sunset.

The deputy manager of the airport, a soft-spoken 43-year-old in gold-rimmed glasses, looks at them wistfully.

Seeking peace

"We want peace," he says. "That's what we're fighting for now. We should carry on until we have a state."

But a 26-year-old ground hostess - Iman, with means Faith - has lost hope that the intifada will deliver.

Life is still punctuated by funerals for those killed in the violence

She is sprucely dressed in a navy blue suit, poised at any moment to turn a winning smile on a passenger.

But she says that if she wanted to travel just from Gaza to the West Bank she would have to cross the border into Egypt, fly from there to Jordan and then drive into the West Bank.

"The Israelis are strangling us," she says.

Twice, Iman has had to sleep at the airport because the Israeli army had blocked her way home.

She used to have plans to become a pilot - not any longer.

Keeping spirits up

Our conversation is cut short when the airport staff have to leave for the funeral of the brother of a colleague - a 37-year-old deaf and dumb man shot dead by Israeli soldiers while he was walking near an army checkpoint.

They will be back tomorrow, though, keeping the airport ticking over - trying not to let their spirits sag.

"Everyone is talking about peace now and a Palestinian state," the airport official tells me. "We have to believe them."

And with peace his planes could take to the skies over Gaza airport again.

"Today it's closed," he says. "Tomorrow, who knows."

And who knows, perhaps Gaza could one day be the Monte Carlo of the Middle East.