But with America's acquiescence, Israel refused to combine its "disengagement" with a peace process with the Palestinians that would link the West Bank and Gaza and allow a new nation to be born. A partial step allowing Gazans to move goods and labor to and from Israel was never seriously implemented. Israel only partially dismantled its occupation, continuing to control Gaza's borders, airspace and coast.
The strip's vaunted economic recovery sputtered. That was likely part of the reason that Palestinians in early 2006 voted to replace their Fatah-led government, long seen as inept and corrupt, with the Islamist Hamas movement. The United States, which views Hamas as a terrorist group, refused to accept the result. It imposed a tight financial squeeze that denied Hamas leaders access to the international banking system.
Militants grew bolder, capturing a young Israeli soldier in a daring cross-border operation. A Saudi-brokered Palestinian unity government foundered. In bloody pitched battles, Hamas a year ago overwhelmed Fatah's security forces and took full control of the strip.
For its pains, Hamas now rules a population sinking deeper into poverty. An Israeli economic embargo blocks Gazans from day labor in Israel and the trade in goods and raw materials that once sustained the strip's thousands of greenhouses, shops, garment and furniture factories and builders. The lifelines are supplies of donor-funded food, some medicines and modest amounts of fuel, stipends paid to idled Palestinian Authority employees and a black market. Although Israel still admits urgent Palestinian medical cases to its world-class hospitals, bursts of violence, such as last week's suicide truck bombing near the Erez border crossing, delay passage.
A few miles south of the empty luxury Movenpick hotel, on what used to be one of Gaza's most inviting beaches, a ravine of sewage fouls the Mediterranean, part of what the U.N. estimates is a more than 15-million-gallon-a-day discharge. Treatment plants can't operate effectively because of frequent power cuts caused by fuel shortages, according to the U.N.'s humanitarian agency. The few visitors who enter Gaza through the huge, high-tech Erez crossing point encounter a moonscape of demolished buildings, abandoned fields and near-empty roads.
