Poor but victorious, Palestinians savour the return of Gaza

Busy since his arrival from Khan Yunis at 7am, Basil Qweida, 14, could not have been happier. In the synagogue of what had been Gaza's biggest Jewish settlement, echoing to the crashes of a sledge hammer detaching the window frames and strips of aluminium being hurled from the gallery above, Basil beamed as he opened with pride a carrier bag he had been filling all morning to show a football, a baby's rattle, a large blue toy car, a child's yellow plastic helmet an, incongruously, a kettle.

What was he going to do with all this? "I will give it to my mother," he announced, adding that the toys were for his three younger brothers and two sisters, aged from two to 13.

No one can yet say whether Basil will remember yesterday as a turning point in the lives of his people, or whether he can hope to grow up as a citizen of a free and peaceful Palestinian state. But his mood certainly reflected that of the tens of thousands who poured on to the long-forbidden beaches and into the ruins of the former Jewish settlements up and down the Gaza strip from the early hours of yesterday.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, tempered his declaration that it was a day of joy and celebration by warning again that the occupation, even of Gaza, given Israel's control of its borders, had not ended. But for most Palestinians here yesterday, the reunification of Gaza after 38 years was enough cause for unbridled celebration.

The thousands that streamed into Neve Dekalim in the pre-dawn darkness from Khan Yunis were reinforced by those who had waited patiently at the dreaded Abu Houli checkpoint that has so often cut Gaza in two and is now no more.

"I never believed my feet would ever touch this ground," Rasmiya al-Najar, a 50-year-old mother, said as she walked the streets that were thronged last month by protesting Jewish "hilltop youths" seeking to prevent the evacuation. "I never imagined it."

For anyone who has known Gaza in recent times, one of yesterday's most extraordinary sights was also the gridlocked, honking queues of traffic in both directions on the long disused sandy road across the previously lethal no man's land between Rafah, the southernmost town which has suffered more than any other in the conflict, and the neighbouring settlement of Rafiah Yam.

At one end was the now flattened military base that had protected a settlement reduced to rubble; at the other the shell and bullet- riddled façades of the first Palestinian houses of Tel Sultan, the district that had been without water or power during the siege inflicted by the last major Israeli ground incursion into Rafah in May 2004.

Everyone was shouting; every vehicle was moving at a crawl, the pick-ups bearing the squads of masked Hamas militants with their AK-47s and RPGs, the donkey carts creaking with everything remotely useable or saleable from the abandoned detritus - the cars bulging with families curious to inspect the ruins of what they believed to be a prime cause of their misery over the past five years.

Watching by the roadside, Mahmoud Mahulain, 33, a construction worker dressed in a spotless grey dishdash who lives in one of those houses on the front line, said he hoped that the vacated settlement would be used to build new housing for the thousands in Rafah whose homes have been demolished in the past five years, but added: "My fear is it will be used as a resort for high PA officials."

As dawn broke over Netzarim, long cursed by Palestinian civilians for being the base for many of the most severe army incursions into Gaza City's suburbs, burning debris was already sending long plumes of black smoke into the sky and the green and black flags of Hamas and Islamic Jihad had long been planted in a mountain of rubble, just as they were on the synagogues of Neve Dekalim.

"The settlement was liberated by resistance-weapons and not negotiations," said Ehal al Baz, 21, a young Islamic University student and supporter of Hamas to explain the absence of Palestinian national flags, "and we got here first". As if to underline his point, an ostentatious six-vehicle convoy of masked Islamic Jihad militants drove into the heart of the settlement.

Meanwhile, a single PA bulldozer driver was hard at work trying to demolish the solid concrete wall of the domed synagogue.

The operation's supervisor, Haitam Ghanim, said he was acting under instructions from the Palestinian leadership and added: "We do not care if it is a synagogue or another building. We are hoping for renewal." Surveying the wreckage of the houses left by Neve Dekalim's 2,500 settlers, he added: "Tell the world that Israel took our land, enjoyed it and left it like this." But, unlike Mr Al Boz, he said that disengagement was "50 per cent resistance and 50 per cent an Israeli decision. We should not kid ourselves."

But one devout Muslim Islamic University student, Ibrahim Abu Speh, in Neve Dekalim to celebrate the "restoration of the land", said: "I disagree with it. Our religion is to respect all others: Jewish, Buddhist whatever." But it was inevitable after the Israeli cabinet's reversal of its earlier instruction to the army to destroy the buildings. According to Israeli media reports, the Prime Minster, Ariel Sharon, referred to them on Sunday as "houses that used to be synagogues".

Hamad Hamdan, 38, and his friend Nael Amar, 31, chose not to go to the settlements but instead to savour the beach at Shirat Hayam, which had long been the exclusive preserve of the settlers. Mr Amar said: "It is like a child who didn't see his mother for 38 years and is brought to her and told: 'This is your mother'."