Palestine Square is the busy, noisy, scruffy heart of Gaza City, and it was as good a place as any to gauge the mood here as Ariel Sharon drifts between life and death.
Shoppers and traders bustled round the pavement stalls, and taxis blared their horns as they navigated the traffic jam.
And, among people in the square, some of them said that, as Muslims, they regard all life as sacred and they wish the Israeli leader well.
But the overwhelming emotion towards Mr Sharon was of the hardest kind.
'War criminal'
It is difficult to overstate how much Palestinians loathe him. For decades he has embodied the most formidable face of their Israeli foe.
For many Israelis, Mr Sharon was the leader they needed as they confronted forces that talked of destroying them.
He was tough enough to grind down their enemies - groups that were prepared to send suicide bombers to kill indiscriminately in the cafes and buses of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
But to people in Palestine Square, Mr Sharon is a war criminal.
"We are waiting minute by minute for Sharon's death. We'll draw comfort from it, because he is the cause of our problems"
They remember the massacres carried out in two Palestinian refugee camps by Lebanese militiamen in 1982.
An Israeli inquiry found Mr Sharon indirectly responsible. But Palestinians always held him wholly responsible for the slaughter.
They recall too the killing of nearly 60 people when a unit under Mr Sharon's command blew up 50 homes in the village of Qibya in 1953.
And it was not just a series of military blows that he dealt Palestinians down through the decades.
For a long time, he championed the spread of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and masterminded the suppression of Palestinian militancy there.
Grudging respect
Back in Palestine Square, a group of men sitting on plastic chairs on the pavement reflected on Mr Sharon's current plight.
"We want him to suffer as we have suffered," said one of the men. "He's not human, or he wouldn't have killed us as he did."
"You sometimes hear Palestinians say that they need their own Ariel Sharon"
And a man working at a food stall had this message for Mr Sharon as he struggles for his life: "Go Sharon. Go."
But there were also signs of a certain black respect for the Israeli leader. Some people here are ready to concede that he fought his people's corner to devastating effect. You sometimes hear Palestinians say that they need their own Ariel Sharon.
Another money changer, Mohammad, a grey-bearded man in a white skullcap, said: "Sharon is faithful to his people - more faithful to his people than Arab leaders are to theirs. He looks after his people.
"But if he dies we hope that his successor will be better for peace."
However dire its relationship often was with Mr Sharon, the Palestinian leadership is worried by his passing from the scene.
The upheaval in Israel will inevitably further delay any possibility of a resumption of peace talks.
There is the possibility too that Israel may move to the right - that the Likud Party under Binyamin Netanyahu may emerge from the crisis in a strong position and take an even harder line on the Palestinian issue than Mr Sharon did.
Stature
Some in the Palestinian Authority argue that Mr Sharon had shown by withdrawing from Gaza that he was ready to uproot settlements and cede occupied territory, and that he appeared to be positioning himself to pull out of more of the West Bank.
It was also recognised that Mr Sharon had the stature to be able to sell to his people any deal that he might have struck in the peace process.
But many Palestinians would say that all that kind of thinking is naive.
They would argue that Mr Sharon would never have given up enough of the West Bank to constitute a viable Palestinian state - that he was determined to keep large tracts of occupied land, including all of East Jerusalem.
The Israeli government's plan for "disengaging" from Gaza says: "It is clear that in the West Bank, there are areas which will be part of the state of Israel, including cities, towns and villages, security areas and installations, and other places of special interest to Israel."
When one of Mr Sharon's leading advisers publicly described the disengagement plan as a means of putting the dreams of a Palestinian state in "formaldehyde", most Palestinians took him at his word.
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