Gaza faces bleak future even when bombs stop

After another sleepless night of terrifying Israeli bombardment in her battered Gaza neighbourhood, Um Mohammed was at the end of her tether.

"We are scared to death, but where should we go? Does fighting Hamas mean wiping out Gaza?" the mother of five asked. In the thick of a 19-day-old blitz that Israel says is meant to deter Hamas fighters from firing rockets at it, Palestinians focused on survival find it hard to contemplate what lies ahead.

"A future for Gaza?" Um Mohammed queried, taken aback by the question. "Listen, my son is five years old. He will carry these images in his mind forever. Will he ever believe in peace?"

So does anyone have a vision for Gaza's 1.5 million people, squeezed between Israel, Egypt and the sea, once the war stops?

The densely populated, 45 km long strip has seen plenty of misery since refugees, uprooted from their land in what is now Israel, swarmed into it during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

After Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war, it seethed under occupation until the 1993 Oslo peace accords sparked brief hope for progress toward Palestinian statehood.

For a few years Gaza's economy saw some growth. Optimists dreamed it could become a new Singapore on the Mediterranean. All that crumbled in the Israeli-Palestinian violence that erupted in 2000 after the collapse of US-led peace talks.

Israel's abrupt unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 only emphasised its physical separation from the occupied West Bank. Israeli border controls kept its people penned in.

Gazans have lived under Hamas rule since the Islamist group seized the enclave in 2007, 18 months after it won a Palestinian election against President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction.

Many Palestinian voters were fed up with the perceived corruption of the Palestinian Authority, and with its hapless acquiescence in a US-led "peace process" that went nowhere. However, their democratic choice led to another dead end.

Backed by the United States and its European and Arab allies, Israel ostracised the Hamas-led government and tightened its economic blockade on Gaza. Foreign aid dried up.

Life for Gazans became even harsher after Hamas drove its Fatah rivals out, widening the split with the West Bank and weakening Abbas's claim to speak for Palestinians on peace.

Now, with 984 Gazans dead and some 4,300 wounded so far, Palestinians are wary of looking beyond the rubble and ruins.

"The Israeli war on Gaza is undermining the peace process, undermining the moderates," said veteran negotiator Saeb Erekat. "You cannot say you want peace and conduct killing fields."

Neither he nor other pro-Abbas advisers would spell out their views on Gaza's post-war future, although some US officials are already talking of foreign-funded reconstruction as an opportunity to bolster Abbas at Hamas's expense.