Middle East: Michael Jansen visits Ramallah and Gaza and finds that a week after the Israeli incursion , Palestinians are not being terrorised but they are traumatised.
Ramallah, the besieged Palestinian capital in the West Bank, is bustling, booming and bursting at the seams. Its streets are filled with snarls of cars, trucks and minibuses. Its pavements are packed with people strolling past shops crammed with clothes and shoes and vendors selling cheap plastic goods and headscarves in garish colours and decorated in sequins.
Thousands of West Bankers from outlying towns and villages are flocking to Ramallah to look for jobs because there are none at home. In Ramallah there is life and at least a chance of employment.
In Ramallah, there are banks, businesses, think tanks, non- governmental agencies, charitable organisations and foreign missions which hire Palestinians to run offices, drive cars, carry messages.
In Ramallah there is a certain amount of space to breathe, even though it is nearly surrounded by Israel's wall and fence complex which is gradually confining West Bankers to tight islands of urban territory, isolated city states.
The decorative metal frame arching over the traffic island at Manara Square at the city centre is draped with a Palestinian flag three-storeys high. The stone lions - once a symbol of Palestinian aspirations - standing or sitting at the edge of the wall are battered and plastered with advertisements. Hamas's green flags flutter from lamp-posts.
A poster slung from ropes overhead proclaims: "Stop Israel's state terror in Gaza."
Gaza is not terrorised. A week after Palestinian fighters captured an Israeli corporal, Gaza remains defiant in spite of Israeli missile attacks on activists, nerve-rattling sonic booms from low-flying Israeli aircraft, reoccupation of the Palestinian airport in the south.
In spite of Israel's bombing of the Palestinian power plant which provides 75 per cent of the electricity for the 1.4 million inhabitants of the Strip; in spite of the closure by Israel of the few crossings for goods and people and disruption of fuel supplies.
Ahmad Abdullah, a headmaster at a school in Jabalya refugee camp, speaks for most Gazans when he says: "We should not agree to release the Israeli soldier unless Israel gives us our prisoners. What do they want with Palestinian women and children?" he asks.
"After they bombed our electricity, the prime minister's office and other places, they made it all the more difficult for us to release their soldier without giving us our prisoners."
But Gaza is traumatised. The streets are nearly empty. Many shops are shuttered. Few people are in the streets.
Dr Jumaa Saqqa of Shifa hospital says women are delivering babies prematurely due to tension and shock.
The intensive care unit for infants, which has 33 incubators, has more than 40 infants, some doubled up. A tiny curly-haired mite with a heart defect is dying because he cannot be taken to Israel for surgery.
No routine operations are being performed and the wards have been cleared of all but the most serious cases.
"We are prepared to receive many casualties. We have medicine for a month in normal circumstances, but if there are many wounded we won't have enough for a week.
"If we don't get fuel for the generators, people in intensive care and babies in incubators will die five minutes after the power is cut. The generators switch on in five seconds."
Shifa hospital has received 10 casualties so far, but other hospitals and clinics have also had their share. Shifa is the regional hospital and is sent the major cases.
Dr Ahmad Abu-Tawahina, deputy director of the Gaza community mental health programme which runs three outreach clinics and a women's empowerment programme, remarks: "More and more people are being treated for stress. We are a stressed nation, even mental health professionals need treatment. Half the population is below the age of 16.
"Children are suffering from a variety of disorders. They wet their beds, bite their nails, and pull out their hair. They have nightmares and fear separation from their mothers.
"Women have psychosomatic problems: headaches, general fatigue, back pain, vertigo and panic attacks. They believe their husbands will not return when they leave home."
On the beach across the street from his office, a scattering of youths are playing with beach balls, plunging in the rough surf and trying to paddle flat boats beyond the foaming shore.
Two girls sit with their feet in the water, a toddler walks along the sand with his mother, dressed in an elaborately embroidered traditional dress.
No one has money to pay for a ride on the donkey tethered to a rock in the water. Normally, the beach would be packed.
But since seven members of a family from the north were killed by an Israeli artillery shell last month, many children are afraid to go to the beach.
"It is the best place in Gaza," Tamara, a Palestinian student says. "It's the only place where we can breathe."
As the light begins to soften and fade, Gaza is startled by two window-cracking sonic booms. Night begins like this.
The booms come in the dark, rattling roof tiles and bedsteads.
A constant threat of death and destruction hovers over families huddling in hot, humid, unlit homes.
Once the World Cup ends, football will cease to lighten the lives of those who have current or generators to power television sets. For many, football provides some solace for Palestinians trapped on the anvil of Gaza, under the hammer of the Israeli army seeking one lost soldier.