GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP -- It has been weeks since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, but Abdul Hadi Abu Hadaf still gets a thrill throwing open his second-story window each morning.
For five years, Israeli forces ordered the 56-year-old farmer to keep his window shut, afraid that Palestinian snipers would use his house to fire on Jewish settlers in nearby Gush Katif. Israeli soldiers also plowed under his olive groves, orange trees and date palms to make space for a watchtower and parking spaces for two tanks.
"I've been living cooped up like a chicken. I was forbidden even to sit here in my front yard," Hadaf says, sitting on a plastic chair beneath a tree outside his cinder-block house.
Palestinians across the Gaza Strip are reveling in small but significant new freedoms. Traveling the 25 miles from one end of Gaza to the other, a journey once measured in hours or days because of checkpoints and road closures, is now a 45-minute commute. Machine gun watchtowers that kept much of the Palestinian population under constant surveillance have vanished. The Jewish settlements they grew to hate and fear lie in ruins, popular attractions now for scrap metal scavengers and busloads of Palestinian schoolchildren on field trips.
But amid the fanfare, a bitter realization is settling in that even though the Israelis are gone, the Palestinians remain deeply dependent on their former occupiers for everything, including their future.
Although Israeli soldiers and settlers are no longer here, Israel maintains authority over Gaza's airspace and ocean access. It also oversees the import or export of all goods to the Gaza Strip's 1.3 million residents, and controls access by the trickle of Gazans allowed to work, visit family or seek medical assistance in Israel.
Without any guarantees that Israel will ease access, investors are unlikely to flock to Gaza anytime soon. The sliver of Mediterranean coastline will remain cut off, Palestinian leaders fear, and locked in grinding poverty.
"It feels good right now in Gaza to walk around and have this much more land and to be able to go out to the sea. But slowly the mentality of imprisonment is going to set in," said Diana Buttu, legal adviser and spokeswoman for the Palestinian Authority. "It's going to be a matter of months before there is going to be lot of anger in this place all over again."
Unless, Buttu adds, the Israelis and Palestinians can reach agreements to allow greater Palestinian control over Gaza's borders and its future.
