SKIP TO THE NEXT STOP: In Transit: Crossings and Separations

Palestinians walk through a long passageway at Erez between Israel and Gaza. (Photo credit: Agence-France Presse)

The Gaza Strip is often held up as the future of borders. It is so carefully sealed, the Israeli army says, that it has been the source of far fewer suicide bombers than anywhere else. Nezah Mashiah, director of the Seam Line Project, once was in charge of the Gaza perimeter fence and considers it a model for the new barrier. But Gaza at the moment seems like a model only for the stuttering, ubiquitous borders of war.

I exit the Jewish Gaza settlement and enter Palestinian Gaza through a different checkpoint: Erez. The system has been modified since I was last here. A neat terminal with a separate entrance has been erected for VIPs and non-Palestinians. Here, teenage passport agents pipe in Hebrew pop music. Elsewhere, Palestinians who have cleared age limits and background checks show their work permits and identifications and trudge to their jobs through an enclosed corridor, single file, sometimes with T-shirts up, shoes off, to show they have no weapons.

I walk down a dusty road. There's no sidewalk. A deep mechanic's pit -- once used to inspect the underbellies of cars for bombs or even to dismantle entire vehicles -- appears abandoned. At one midway identification check, a guard asks for my transit pass, then urges me on. Fifteen minutes later I reach the Palestinian side.

Twenty-two suicide bombers from Gaza have blown themselves up in Israel over the past two years, according to the Israeli army, and 32 Qassem rockets and mortar shells were fired from Gaza at Israel. That compares with hundreds of suicide attacks but only seven mortar shell attacks from the West Bank. Fences may stop people from leaving the Gaza Strip, but Palestinians have found rockets that clear them.

Photos of Palestinian "martyrs" -- suicide bombers, guerrilla fighters, stone throwers and also noncombatants felled in the crossfire -- adorn many Gaza City public spaces.

In Gaza City, I had planned to meet staff members of the French NGO Medicins Sans Frontieres to tour Gaza's borderlines, but the doctors are caught at checkpoints. All Gaza stories seem to involve being stuck.

French doctor Sophie Malhiers tells me via cell phone that she's stuck elsewhere in Gaza, but the soldiers won't say why the road is closed. This happens often. The Israeli army has divided Gaza into tiers, and it is difficult or impossible to cross between them. Sometimes the road is closed to Palestinians for hours to allow a convoy of Jewish settlers to pass. The Jewish settlers themselves are like mobile borders, because wherever they go, Palestinians can't.

Halima Abu Jilal and her children stand outside their home, where they often watch the tank and rifle fire.

After many hours, Sophie meets me the at home of Halima Abu Jilal, whose young daughter, like many kids in Gaza, has worms. Sophie gets out her bag, filled with syringes, pills, a stethoscope and bandages, and offers Halima medication.

Asked if there has been shooting here recently, Halima says no. "It's been a while since there was any shooting -- since yesterday." Yesterday the sky was red with fire, but with no place to take cover, the family sat outside on plastic lawn chairs in the sand. Halima points out a tank on the neighboring hill.

A seashell map of all of British Mandate Palestine in the office of the Gaza Fishermen's Syndicate.

"I hope for peace," says Halima. "Because we die a thousand times a day. My 12-year-old daughter drew for the psychologist a bus exploding in Israel -- but, God willing, I try to convince her this is not the life. I tell her we can't continue like that -- they kill and we kill. She told me the people who have the bombs will be safe. She's never left Gaza." The Fenced Sea

Gaza is one of the world's most crowded cities -- and surely one of its most enclosed. Always in Gaza City you hear layers of dozens of voices: many, many people with nowhere to go. On my earlier visits, it seemed the only way out was the sea. Families laughed and walked and ran alongside it, fishermen piloted boats filled with their catch. The seaside could not be hemmed in.

Now, the head of the Gaza fishermen's syndicate sits in an office facing rows of beached fishing boats. He gets out a piece of paper to sketch for me a triangle showing the limited zone where the Israeli army allows fishermen to fish. Israel says that Palestinians could be carrying arms caches on their boats, but the fishermen say they're just trying to feed their families. They are allowed to go only to deep sea in the very center of the Gaza Strip, far from Israel's and Egypt's shores.

In an otherwise empty café in the salty air by the shore, fisherman Abed Bakr sips coffee and relates how he was apprehended by the Israeli navy earlier this year. "I was in the permitted area. We were 11 people on the boat, including my three sons, aged 13, 14 and 15. The Israelis came and started shooting at us and said, 'Either I sink your boat or you come with us to [the Israeli port city of] Ashdod.' They arrested us 11 days, and the boat one month," he says. "I don't go to the sea anymore."

Standing by the large boat he cannot use, watching his sons and nephews pull to shore on tiny, shallow-water boats that float just offshore to bring home the reduced family income on the ends of their fishing rods, looking out at the sea that he says once comfortably sustained 50 of his family members, he says, "This very large sea is very tiny for me."