Eyad el-Sarraj, founder and head of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, has spent years recording the traumatic psychological impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on local families. Now he describes something dangerous eating into Gazan society itself. One symptom revealed itself during factional fighting a year ago. Mr. el-Sarraj compares how he was treated in an Israeli hospital with the "viciousness" displayed here. In the heat of battle, wounded fighters were pursued inside hospitals and killed, he said. "There is a process we can call disintegration [in] every aspect of life in Gaza today," he says.
Sami Abdel-Shafi clings to hope of an alternative. The son of a surgeon and nephew of the late Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a respected Gaza elder statesman, he gave up a Silicon Valley career in 2003 to start a consulting business in Gaza with his cousin Salah, an economist. He recently prepared a report on Gaza investment opportunities for an international conference in Bethlehem. It touts the territory's "skilled and highly motivated labor force" and potential growth in agriculture, trade, light industry, information technology, construction and real estate development, subcontracting and consulting. Gaza's adaptable private sector, it notes dryly, "has great resistance to failure."
