EL BUREIJ, Gaza Strip — It was not much of an escape.
Moments after Ibrahim al-Awawda climbed over the nine-foot fence separating the Bureij refugee camp on Gaza’s eastern edge from Israel, he was surrounded by six Israeli soldiers. They arrested him, interrogated him and, after he had spent a month in two Israeli prisons, sent him back to the poverty, death and destruction in Gaza that had led him to flee.
“I knew they would capture me,” said Ibrahim, 15, whose father was killed in an Israeli strike in 2002 and who has since lived through three wars between Israel and Gaza militants, including last summer’s bloody 50-day battle. “The war shook me,” he added. “I told myself I may find a better life. They served me good food, but later, they threw me back to Gaza.”
Ibrahim is one of an increasing number of young Palestinians from Gaza who have been caught trying to cross into Israel in the nearly six months since the latest conflagration subsided. Though he carried nothing with him, others were armed with knives or grenades.
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Three days earlier, his mother recalled, Noor had asked for a copy of his identity card. That morning, he changed clothes several times before settling on jeans and a black shirt. He had almost never had a decent night’s sleep since the war, his father said, and he had been asking a sister’s husband who had spent six years in Israeli prison what life was like there.
Now he knows. The younger Mr. Zawara’a, who left school after 11th grade and worked occasionally harvesting olives or in construction, calls once a day from the jail in Beersheba where he is awaiting trial Feb. 23 for entering Israel illegally.
“The prison is good, because all of them live in a sense of safety,” said Ms. Zawara’a, who has visited her son twice in jail. “After the war, he got really depressed. He started to feel like there is no life and there is no money, no employment.”
“All the people in this place, in each house, you can find someone who tried to cross,” she added. “When I was traveling in the bus, the Israelis were asking us: ‘What’s wrong? Suddenly, the whole neighborhood is coming to us.’”
