Gaza: a disturbing dispatch from a no-go area

Foreigners are mainly staying away from Gaza these days. Only a handful of international UN staff are based there now, their movements heavily restricted by the use of armoured convoys and armed Palestinian security escorts. Which is not surprising, since gunmen fired 11 shots into the side of an armoured car carrying the United Nations Relief and Works Agency field director John Ging on the main north-south highway after their kidnap attempt was thwarted by the locked doors.

Lauren Aarons, a courageous 24-year-old Londoner, took the very job at the Al Mezan human rights office in Gaza that her fellow Briton Kate Burton was forced to leave after her own kidnap in December 2005.

Ordered out a few days after the kidnap of the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, Ms Aarons was provided with a small, armed Palestinian escort last week to return, pack her belongings and bid a sad farewell to the Palestinian family who had rented her an apartment since late September.

She lived through both the "terrifying" Israeli missile attacks near her home, and through the lethal Fatah-Hamas warfare which reached its peak just before the Saudi-brokered ceasefire in Mecca in February. But she says of the underlying insecurity of which Mr Johnston's kidnap remains a symbol: "I am shocked how fast things have deteriorated in the past seven months. Everything seems so normal but a lot more sinister things are happening below the surface." Ms Aarons is right.

By the standards of a Gaza City inured to many kinds of violence over the past seven years, the incident outside Roots restaurant was hardly news. Around noon, the gold-coloured Honda saloon belonging to the restaurant's part-owner Muna Al-Ghalayini was wrecked by a loud explosion audible at least a kilometre away. Fortunately at the time Ms Al-Ghalayini was in the elegant - but of course alcohol-free - restaurant. She was reluctant to speculate about the perpetrators, saying only: "I don't know who did this but the police are investigating it."

Yes she was a little afraid as a result of the explosion. According to one theory, Ms Al-Ghalayini had recently stopped a young man entering on one of the restaurant's family-only nights, saying that he could only come in if he was with his sister, and that he had promised revenge. According to another, Roots, a favoured haunt for middle-class couples and their children eager to escape from the relentless pressures of life in the Strip, did not fit the requirements of extreme socially conservative elements in Gaza.

Either way, the incident, however minor, appears to fit an ominously growing undercurrent of lawlessness which a new national unity government and its drafting of a new security plan has so far failed to arrest.

Eight days ago, Al Ataa, a popular culture centre in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, was broken into and set on fire by an unknown group of assailants. The attackers completely destroyed the computer room of the centre, which aims especially to serve local women and children, runs workshops in non-violence among its many activities and was originally sponsored in co-ordination with the World Bank by the Welfare Association - one of the charities in The Independent's Christmas appeal. At the same time they destroyed one of the centre's libraries, containing about 5,000 books. Ibtisam El-Za'anin, who heads the society's board of directors, estimated the cost of the lost equipment at around $80,000 (£40,000) and the damage to the building at $40,000. She, too, said she had no idea who had carried out the attack, but assumed that they "wanted to stop our work. Perhaps they don't want girls and women to have chances and goals for the future and think we should go back to a situation where women stay at home."

She added: "I am very sad, but we insist that we will go on with our work. We will not yield."

Then in the early hours of last Sunday, an explosive device was detonated at the entrance to the Christian Bible Society's store in the heart of Gaza City. The society - among much else - provides language and computer training courses to Muslims as well as Christians.

After travelling to Gaza to inspect the extensive damage to the entrance and windows, Labib Madanat, the society's Palestinian director, also declared that its work would continue in Gaza, adding: "It's a tragedy. The Bible Society exists to serve the whole population of Gaza."

Why did Mr Madanat think it had happened? "I think it's a mixture of the failure of diplomacy, of politics, because of years of deferred justice, and Islamic fundamentalism, an extreme form of Islam or religion. But the other reason is a chaos in Gaza that leaves room for everything."

There are few Gazans with whom that last point will not strike a chord. For Gaza may now be near what David Shearer, the head of the UN's Office of Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs calls the "tipping point" - the moment that will decide whether the new national unity government brokered in Saudi Arabia can assert a grip on internal security - and get the international help it needs to do so, or whether it descends headlong into a full-scale version of what the former Fatah cabinet minister Sufian Abu Zaida - who was himself briefly kidnapped by Hamas gunmen in December - already calls the "Somali-isation" of the Strip.

The Foreign Press Association warned this week that the kidnapping of Mr Johnston, who disappeared more than five weeks ago, had helped to make Gaza "effectively a no-go zone" for foreign journalists. Even in the days immediately after the kidnapping, you could travel the length of Gaza, to the southern border crossing of Rafah - and linger there talking to Palestinians coming back from Egypt - without incident or visible threat. Since then, the John Ging kidnap attempt, the reports of gunmen entering the TV production offices in central Gaza City saying they were looking for more foreign journalists to kidnap, the sheer length of Mr Johnston's ordeal, have made the threat seem much more real. All of which underlines the brutal destructiveness of the kidnap to the Palestinian cause, just when it most needs support. And moving round Gaza City with even one vehicle containing armed Palestinian security men, as The Independent was persuaded to do this week, does not make for much productive journalism.

On the surface, Gaza City seems more peaceful than many times in the past three years. True the mounds of rubbish in the streets are growing because of a week-old strike by municipal refuse men who have hardly been paid in the past six months.

But an hour or so after the explosion at Roots on Wednesday, the keffiyah-clad workmen taking a break from building a new mosque close to the Egyptian embassy and not far from where Mr Johnston was kidnappedwere a picture of tranquillity. The drivers jostling with donkey carts and honking their horns in irritation at the worshippers thronging the fruit and vegetable stalls could not have been more normal.

Many of the most worrying trends however, including those of murder, are below the surface. Despite the real reduction caused by the ceasefire there continue to be almost daily ugly - and often fatal - incidents, both between Fatah and Hamas adherents and clans.

After reporting on each violent incident, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, which has been as painstaking in chronicling inter-Palestinian killings as it was the deaths of Gazans under Israeli fire, concludes by urging the Palestinian Authority and Attorney General to investigate it and bring the perpetrators to justice. This has barely happened in the past two years. "Such crimes not only demonstrate how diminished is the Palestinian Authority's ability to enact security," says the Gaza business consultant Sami Abdel Shafi, "but they also uncover an alarming trend of resorting to such violent and uncivil means of stating opinions or resolving grievances".

Whether this can even begin to be contained now depends on an untested new Interior Minister and the new National Security Council, which is supposed to be the joint law enforcement arm of the Fatah-Hamas coalition.

At a minimum that will require support from the international community for the new coalition. So far the US and Israel seem to be focusing only on beefing up forces directly answerable to Mahmoud Abbas. But in the absence of any real chance for the economy, the new PA will require serious aid if it is to prevent civil war and have any chance of reimposing the security that most Gazans crave.

Johnston's kidnapping is longest ordeal for two years

Alan Johnston was seized from his car by gunmen as he drove home on 12 March. His ordeal has been by far the longest of any of the foreigners kidnapped over the past two years. Many thousands have appealed for his release, from BBC listeners and viewers to Palestinian journalists in Gaza. There has been speculation in Gaza that he was seized by a criminal or mercenary family. One such family, Dogmush, was blamed for the kidnap of two Fox TV employees in the summer, but the BBC has had no confirmation they were involved. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, said on Thursday that he had information that Mr Johnston is alive.

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