Going Home to Gaza

Orit Cohen hobbles angrily away from the house as fast as her prosthetic foot will take her. The 13-year-old doesn’t want photos taken of the injury she suffered 22 months ago when a roadside bomb blew up her school bus. From the doorstep, her father Ophir calmly watches her go. He knows she can’t run far. Her leg is still weak, and in any case no one ventures alone outside this isolated Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip, a tiny fortress under constant threat of Palestinian attack.

Three of Ophir Cohen’s eight children lost limbs in the bus bombing, an incident that shook his commitment to stay in Kfar Darom, a settlement of 51 families. But after living near Tel Aviv for 21 months during the children’s rehabilitation, Cohen and his wife Noga brought their family back. “It wasn’t easy,” says Cohen, watching Yisrael, 8, roll by awkwardly on skates. The boy has a prosthetic leg to replace the one he lost just below the knee. “But if you believe this is your land, you know you belong here.” Ideological settlers like Cohen believe they’re living on land God gave to the Jews, as recorded in scripture.

The Cohens’ return to Kfar Darom is a sign of the growing defiance among Israel’s 7,000 Gaza Strip settlers and their 200,000 counterparts in the West Bank. Though settlers are prime targets for attacks, given their proximity to Palestinian communities and the animus their presence evokes, Israelis are still moving into the territories for ideological reasons or for the financial incentives the government offers, such as income-tax breaks and cut-rate mortgages. Since the outbreak of the latest Palestinian uprising, or intifadeh, two years ago, the settler population in the West Bank has risen 4.8%, more than double the increase in the overall number of Israelis. In the 20 Gaza settlements, 242 new families have moved in, adding to the 1,155 families there. Only 25 families have left. Twelve years ago, Ophir Cohen left Jerusalem and was one of the first settlers to move to Kfar Darom, a community of Orthodox Jews. All his children, except the eldest, Orit, were born there. From the beginning, the settlement was ringed with machine-gun emplacements. With today’s heightened dangers, it is now hedged by tanks and more than 3.5-m concrete barriers. On Nov. 20, 2000, the Cohen children boarded their bus to the nearest school, in a settlement two miles away. The bus had barely left the compound when Cohen heard a thunderous boom. He rushed to the scene. By the time soldiers allowed him through, an ambulance had taken away three of his children. Inside the bus, Cohen saw the corpses of two adults. With that image in his mind, he drove fast to find his children at the hospital in Beersheba.

Orit and Yisrael each lost one limb; Tehila, who is now 10, lost both legs below the knee. During the kids’ recuperation at a hospital near Tel Aviv, victims maimed in other attacks visited the kids to show them how well prosthetic limbs could work. Cohen and his wife weren’t sure they would ever return to Kfar Darom. The terror strikes kept mounting. The big suicide bombings in Israel’s cities grabbed the headlines, but attacks on settlers were far more frequent. Of the 624 Israelis killed in the intifadeh, a disproportionately high 125 were settlers, and 70 were Israeli soldiers who died protecting them.

Still, the Cohens felt a religious and national duty to ignore the dangers. So they returned to find Kfar Darom’s population had increased. The settlement’s most recent addition: eight prefabricated apartments with roofs reinforced against the mortars that Palestinian militants shoot toward Kfar Darom most nights. A new school had been built in the settlement so local children don’t have to risk the roads each morning. But not every danger can be guarded against. On a recent afternoon, a rocket-propelled grenade hit the army guard post at the edge of Kfar Darom, punching a grapefruit-size hole in the reinforced concrete turret where a soldier usually stands watch. This is the Cohen family’s welcome home.