Gaza City, Gaza
One Palestinian refugee camp looks pretty much like another: unfinished cinder-block houses intersected by dirt roads, mounds of rotting trash, posters of suicide bombers pasted on the walls. But the Gaza Strip's Beach Camp is different-narrower streets, more rubble, more menacing. Although the Israelis regularly hit the place with drones and F-16's, Israeli assassination teams stayed clear of it. It was too dangerous.
I walked up and down the Beach Camp's main street, looking for the Port Video, but it wasn't where it was supposed to be. Either it never existed or it was long gone. Back on the coast road, I found a man in his sixties, manning a vegetable cart. He thought about it, rubbing his chin, and then pointed at an abandoned building three houses back along the road I'd just come down. "Maybe it was there, I think," he said. "It closed a long time ago."
I went back up and had a look, but there was nothing to show it had
ever been a video store or anything else. Rebars stuck out of the unfinished third floor, waiting for an addition that there would never be enough money for. I kept having the feeling I'd wandered onto a Becket stage set.
Across the street, I noticed a gaunt kid in a ripped Che Guevara T-shirt and military fatigue pants, maybe all of fourteen, toothpick arms folded across his chest. He was leaning against a wall, watching me.
I walked over to him. "Do you know where I can find Nabil Shahadah?"
Instead of answering, the kid pushed himself off the wall, sauntered a few steps down the pitted mud road, and disappeared into the interior of the camp. I waited ten minutes but he never came back.
Saleh had lied to me so I'd go away, I figured. It was that simple: a video store that wasn't a video store for the journalist who wasn't a journalist. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe I was being set up. The obvious next move was to head back to my hotel and get back into Israel as fast as I could. Instead, I decided to make another attempt to find Nabil in the morning.
It was too humid to sleep. The electricity was off. There was no breeze. Only the mosquitos were stirring. For company, I had a late wedding party outside my window. Around one in the morning I gave up on sleep altogether and went out for a walk, south along the road toward Gaza's fishing port. I was nearly out the door before I remembered to grab my pad and photos. Never, ever leave anything in a hotel room.
It was better walking along the beach. There was a puff of a breeze off the water. Thousands of lights twinkled offshore-fishing boats-none of them more than two miles out because of the Israeli blockade. I was a hundred yards down from the hotel when I noticed someone following me. I crossed the street diagonally and caught a glimpse of him: the kid with the toothpick arms from that afternoon. He followed me across the street, gaining on me.
"Come," he said in English.
He turned away from the beach road into a poor neighborhood. I followed him through a maze of cardboard shacks, sheet-metal lean-tos, and more rough cinder-block houses with open sewers running beside them.
y/e came to a trash dump watched by two Fedayeen in fatigues, sitting in I the back of a Toyota pickup with a.30-caliber, belt-fed machine gun cradled between their knees.
The kid left me there, just turned and seemed to disappear through one
I of the cinder-block walls that ran alongside the dump. The humidity and
stench had my stomach roiling. Happily, I'd eaten almost nothing that day.
One of the Fedayeen motioned me to an old Toyota Land Cruiser, indi-I eating I was to get into the backseat. The other Fedayeen got in with me, ¦ forced me on the floor, and threw a blanket over me.
We drove around for a full hour, cutting through back streets, onto an open highway, and then across a washboard dirt road. At one point, the Toyota bottomed out over what felt like a trench, slamming me hard against the floor.
When we eventually stopped, someone pulled me roughly out of the back, pushed me against the side of the car, and yanked the eight-by-eleven pad and photos out of my hand. Two new Fedayeen, faces covered with kafiyahs, walked up to us. The taller was carrying a stubby AK with a grenade launcher under the barrel. The short one grabbed me by the arm and led me down a couple of narrowing alleys and through the ground floors of two plywood houses until we came to a house that had been used as an abattoir, and not long ago. Dried blood covered the walls and ran across the floor into the alley. There were no windows. The minute the Fedayeen closed the door behind me, I was cast into pitch black.
I stood there I don't know how long-I was afraid to even sit down- until a grinding noise started up outside, as if something large were chewing on the corner of our bunker-building. With that, the taller of the two most recent Palestinian escorts came through the door with a hand metal detector. He waved it over me, looking for a beacon or transponder. Satisfied, he signaled for me to follow him.
The room I was led into was darkened, except for a television. In the glow of the screen, I could see a man sitting in a plastic lawn chair. He was alone.
A video was playing-jerky, grainy footage taken by a handheld camera. I could hear the cameraman talk to someone behind him, telling him to
be patient. "He will be here soon," he said. It looked like Gaza, with the fence and the guard tower of a settlement in one corner of the frame.
A bus appeared out of the lower left of the picture, bumping along a gravel road, throwing up plumes of dust. A couple seconds behind it came a Pajero, gaining on the bus. The camera panned left, following the bus to what was now clearly a Jewish settlement surrounded by razor wire. The Pajero inexplicably slowed, and the bus passed through the gates of the settlement.
"This is where he loses his faith," the man sitting in the chair said. "But not for long. Watch."
The Pajero swung around to the main road, turned right, and picked up speed fast. Just for a moment, you could see the face of the driver-a boy, his head barely above the window. You couldn't see where he was headed until the cameraman panned right and picked up an Israeli military jeep, mesh over the windows, a long whip antenna. The jeep suddenly stopped, the doors flew open, and two Israeli soldiers started to sprint away from the jeep. The Pajero was maybe ten yards away from the jeep when it exploded, sending plumes of dust and rocks in all directions. Seconds later the two Israeli soldiers ran out of the cloud of debris, sandblasted but alive.
The man switched off the TV and turned on the table light next to him. It was Nabil Shahadah. A dozen years older, but I recognized him from the Peshawar photo.
Nabil was a small man, still rail thin with unruly hair and a great hedge of a mustache that looked to be dyed jet-black. His body, though, couldn't hide the hard years on the run. A wound or maybe arthritis had taken over his knees. He grunted, pushed himself to his feet, and walked stiff-legged over to the hot plate in the corner to turn on the gas burner to make coffee. He worked silently until the coffee was ready, then carried a cup over to me and settled down again with his own.
"The target was the bus, wasn't it?" I asked.
Nabil nodded.
"It looked like there were children on it."
"There were," he said, bristling. "Do Israeli F-16's differentiate between children and our martyrs?"
II knew I had to let it go. That's not what I'd come for. Still, I was curious. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian suicide bombers hit only military ¦targets. In Lebanon in the eighties, it was the same thing-military targets lonly- Then Nabil and Hamas changed the rules when they started targeting
tises. It was now slaughter for slaughter's sake, a pornography of violence. "Why did you want to see me?" he asked. "The Israelis couldn't have nt you. They're not that dumb." "Give me back my stuff. I want to show you something." Nabil yelled at the darkened doorway. When one of the Fedayeen came, Nabil whispered in his ear and sent him off. The Fedayeen was back in •wo minutes. I handed Nabil the photo of his parents and the letter.
"I saw your parents two days ago. I took their picture. But I'm not going ¦to lie to you that I came here for that. I need you to help me find someone." I probably imagined it, but Nabil looked as if he was softening, holding ¦the picture of his mother and father.
"What is it you want?" he asked, turning back to me. I pulled out the Peshawar photo and handed it to him. He looked surprised. I could tell he'd never seen it before, probably even forgotten he'd B›een photographed that day. For Nabil, Peshawar must have been a life-Btime ago.
"You're standing on the far right," I said. "The man I am looking for is ¦on the far left. The slight guy with the fine features. I'm pretty sure he's Branian. Maybe a Pasdaran officer."
"He was. But I don't remember his name. On the other hand, it doesn't ¦latter."
"Why?" "He's dead."