The Palestinians in Gaza have come to dread the phone ringing at midnight. Too often a stranger's voice, in flawless Arabic, will say, "I'm from the Israel Defense Forces. This is a warning. We're going to bomb your house in 15 minutes. Leave and tell your neighbors."

Usually the Israeli intelligence is accurate--Gaza seethes with Palestinian informers--and the bombs, dropped by an F-16 fighter circling this narrow coastal strip on the Mediterranean, will destroy a hideout, weapons cache or hidden tunnel.

But often those warnings aren't enough to save the innocent. One day last month, the Israelis dropped two enormous charges on a house in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, where smugglers were trying to tunnel into Egypt under a 25-ft.-high concrete wall built by the Israelis.

There had been the usual telephone heads-up, but the blasts were so fierce that flying debris injured 50 neighbors. A spear of shrapnel flew more than 500 yards away and killed a 14-year-old girl, Damilaz Hamad. According to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Damilaz is among 60 women and children killed in air strikes since June, when Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in response to the abduction of an Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit. At Damilaz's funeral, militants in black T shirts fired AK-47s in the air.

On a white wall, someone had sprayed the words CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FAMILY FOR THE MARTYRDOM OF DAMILAZ HAMAD. The only genuine grief was from the girl's paraplegic mother, who lay crumpled on a mattress on a dirty floor, wailing for her lost daughter.

I listened to friends trying to convince the family that Allah had singled out Damilaz, instead of all the ruffians and murderers in this blighted stretch of Gaza, for an early death because her suffering was sure to be rewarded in paradise. Otherwise, my interpreter explained to me, "her death will seem pointless, and her family will grieve more."

For the Palestinians, sorrow has become routine. While the international community has committed itself to enforcing the two-month-old cease-fire between Israel and Hezballah in Lebanon, the siege of Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants goes on, battering the territory's infrastructure, paralyzing its economy and leaving what's left of the Palestinian government in chaos. As Israeli warplanes attack from the air--all told, their bombs have destroyed 43 buildings and killed more than 220 people, most of them suspected militants--the two rival Palestinian political factions, the Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamic militants of Hamas who back Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, have engaged in daily gun battles that left more than a dozen dead in three days of fighting last week.

At this point, Palestinians seem to think they are closer to seeing civil war than to realizing their dream of a viable, independent state. "We are used to blaming our mistakes on others," says Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad in a moment of candor.

"But we have all been attacked by the bacteria of stupidity."

(Source: Time.com)