WHEN he worked as a labourer in Israel, the Palestinian distance runner Majed Abu Maraheel kept fit by jogging daily from, his home in Gaza City to the border checkpoint at Erez, about 20 kilometres to the north. "As I ran, I dreamt" that one day I would be a hero," he said recently sitting bare footed on a mat in his house. "I dreamt that I could carry the Palestinian flag and compete in world sport."

Abu Maraheel was speaking on the afternoon of February 24th. The following morning Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, set loose its suicide bombers in Israel, killing 25 in Jerusalem and Ashkalon. The terrorist attacks would continue, threatening the Middle East peace process, but Abu Maraheel's dream stayed intact.

He will compete in at least one heat of the 10,000 metres and, best of all, carry the Palestinian flag around Atlanta's Olympic Stadium in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games.

Palestinians? In the Olympics? The thought re-chills the blood. The last time Palestinians appeared on the Olympic stage was in 1972 when they were among the eight Arab terrorists who killed 11 Israeli sportsmen at Munich.

What right has Palestine - not yet a nation but a "self-ruled territory" - to compete in the 1996 Games? The short answer is that other non nations do. For example, the US citizens of Puerto Rico, within the United States' little cited "Commonwealth," regularly send teams to the Olympics. So does the Pacific island of Guam, a US "Trust Territory."

Anyway, Palestine now has an Olympic seal of approval. In the autumn of 1993 the International Olympic Committee granted provisional recognition to the Palestinian Olympic Committee (POC). So Palestine is one of the 28 new IOC members - including former Soviet Union and Yugoslav republics - who have accepted invitations to send teams to Atlanta.

Impoverished Palestine's travelling expenses, what's more, will be no crippling problem. Olympic Solidarity, a fond set up to give financial assistance to its members, will pay for nearly all of the delegation's trip to Atlanta.

In the past, between 1934 and 1951, Palestine was a member of the Olympic family, though it never sent a team to the Games. "We might have competed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin," Ravie Al Tuk, the current deputy president of the POC, told me from Cairo where he is acting ambassador to Egypt. "We might have been in London in 1948 as well. But on each occasion we had other problems on our minds."

This is a wry understatement. In the summer of 1936 Palestinians were rioting under the British Mandate, protesting, against the widespread resettlement of Jews on their land. In 1948, following Israel's War of Independence and its subsequent recognition as a state by the United Nations, the area was in turmoil.

"There is little sign that the Arabs will accept the existence of Israel," The Times of London's Middle East correspondent noted two days after the Olympics' opened at Wembley Stadium. He went on to write of the "flames of resentment burning everywhere along the borders of Israel." Clearly, in those years Palestine had no time nor taste for international sport.

In 1996, peace, however uncertain, had touched his land and Abu Maraheel stretched out his long legs as he contemplated Atlanta. He was a happy man, handsome and confident, and yet the many responsibilities incumbent in such a journey bore down from the white walls round him.

There was a gigantic Palestinian flag and, beside it, a ceramic plate inscribed with a passage from the Koran. There were photographs of his father, robed as a young man in white Bedouin dress, and his brothers in dark suits. My sisters are hiding in here," Abu Maraheel added and slid his hand inside his shiny, green training jacket. He tapped his heart. He laughed revealing a jumble of teeth.

Suddenly, I noticed it. A hand grenade rested on a far shelf. It might have been made by Americans for Israelis, or perhaps by Russians for Palestinians. In fact, said Abu Maraheel, it was Israeli. "It is a souvenir of the days I worked in Israel," he said. "A friend found it buried on a farm."

The grenade was fetched down from the shelf. It felt heavy, deadly, and yet it was empty of powder. Its pin had been removed. Did Ahu Maraheel keep this weapon as a reminder of war? Or, now rendered harmless, might it be taken as a symbol of peace? "It is a souvenir," he repeated.

The exact size of Palestine's Atlanta delegation has not yet been fixed. The plan is to send nine officials and two sportsmen. Abu Maraheel and the walker Yasser Ali Deeb.

ABU Maraheel is the designate flag carrier, an obvious honour. A Gazan, the distance runner was born in the troubled former Occupied Territories while Abu Deeb, a 25 year old student, is the son of Palestinian emigrants to Egypt and was born and reared in Cairo.

Besides, if Abu Maraheel is not a natural leader, he certainly is near to one. He's a bodyguard to Yasser Arafat and thereby hangs a tale. "I won the distance race at the Olympic Day festival last summer in Gaza City," the runner explained, and when His Excellency Yasser Arafat presented me with an award, he asked me what I did for a living. I said I worked in Israel, in a glasshouse growing flowers. I said that when there was trouble I was good at running fast and finding a safe haven. He laughed and said, "In future, you will be my personal bodyguard when I am in Gaza."

Abu Maraheel gave up his cross border job and, now a colonel in the Palestinian National Security Forces, he is a member of "The 17," Arafat's crack presidential guard. He's called to duty four hours a day. If well paid and deeply esteemed, it's a dangerous job, all the more so with Hamas militants implicitly threatening to topple Arafat from power.

"If I am shot, I will become a martyr," said Abu Maraheel, apparently at ease with the thought. "But I am not in big danger. I am always in the second circle." This "circle" places him about 50 metres from the president, sometimes just in view of the world's television cameras. "I like the job, he said. It gives me time to prepare for my sport."

He'd given us plenty of time that day. Our "fixer," a Palestinian film maker, found him for us at the security force's rifle range and, excused from the crackle of target practice, Abu Maraheel posed for photographs with his fellow soldiers; he willingly ran along the long, sweeping Mediterranean beach south of the city. Later, we would see him play for his club team in a football match. But now we were at his house, drinking glasses of sweet teak brought in silently by one of his three young sons.

"I run on the beach four hours every day," Abu Maraheel explained of his rudimentary training sessions. "From 5 to 7 o'clock in the morning and from 6 to 8 in the evenings." He works out on fitness machines at his sports club but he gets little fine tuning from his coach.

His choice of the long distance event is pragmatic. "If I trained for 1,000 years, I might be a 100 metres champion," he said. "If I train for five years, maybe I'll be a 10,000 metres champion.

Unfortunately, with a personal best time of 30 minutes, Abu Maraheel won't be the champion at Atlanta. His time is well outside the Olympic record of 27.21.46 set at the 1988 Seoul Games by the Moroccan, Moulay Brahim Boutayeb, and hopelessly adrift of Ethiopian Haile Gebreselassie's world standard of 26.43.53.

Still, hope springs eternal within the Palestinian's shiny green jacket. "I dream of beating everybody." He grinned, then his faced turned to stone. "If I run against an Israeli, I will not let my country down," he said. "Even if I have to pay with my blood." This was to be his one political statement of the day.

Abu Maraheel's father slipped into the room, just a shadow of the proud Bedouin in the photograph. We were introduced and softly he spoke of the family history. They were from the Negev Desert, near Beersheba, only about 100 kilometres to the east of Gaza City.

"We had land," he said and with his two forefingers he described a neat square of it: 60 dunums, or 15 acres. On this, the family raised corn, cows and the Bedouin black goats. In the 1948 War, when Palestinians either fled or, as they see it, were driven off their land by Israeli troops, the family took cover in a Gaza refugee camp. God willing, concluded the old man, (one day I will return to the Negev.

Majed and his brothers and sisters were born in the refugee camp. It was a grim life, scratching a living off the land. Majed left school at 12, consumed by the dream of playing football or running for Palestine. "My father was interested in my sport," he said, gazing warmly across at the old man. "He would pray to God for my success and wait at the door to hear my results."

The son's affectionate remark together with his silky green jacket - with its Arabic emblem reading "Olive Sports Club of Gaza" - suggests a family life of peace and normality. We might have been interviewing an athlete anywhere on earth until, moments later, the conversation turned to intifada, the Palestinian active protest against Israeli occupation that began in the Gaza, Strip in 1987. It was spearheaded by children burning tyres and throwing rocks.

"I didn't participate," Abu Maraheel claimed. "I was more interested in sport," he paused.

"But I was once shot by an Israeli soldier." He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a ragged scar running down his upper arm. He received it five years ago, when he was 27.

"I remember I had left my house for the sports ground, with my running shoes under my arm," he explained. "I turned a corner and saw many, many children throwing stones at two Israeli jeeps. The Israeli soldiers had captured some children and when the children broke away, I ran with them. An Israeli soldier fired a M16 at us from about 300 metres. I was hit, here in the arm. The bullet broke bones.

HIS injury was not unique. Four and a half per cent of the Palestinian males who grew up through the intifada years suffered broken bones as a result of clashes with Israeli soldiers, according to Dr Mustafa El Masri, a Gaza born, Egyptian university trained psychiatrist at the Gaza Mental Health Commission.

One third of male children in "Gaza and the West Bank moreover, suffer from psychiatric problems arising from such an experience and, shockingly, those who were subjected to at least one traumatic experience" at the hands of Israeli soldiers reach 90 per cent.

"We see this reflected in the games children play," Dr El Masri explained. "A traumatised child will make the same move, with bricks or stones or sand, over and over and over again. The same simple move. The game is not enjoyable to him emotionally it's not satisfying. It's called traumatic play, and it doesn't help him to cope with his changing world."

Ironically, the current peace has created a problem. "For children of the intifada, heroes were limited to warriors or martyrs. This is not a bad thing, at least for the emotional development of a child, because he has to identify with someone. But, if he retains these war heroes when he's not living in war, he will create war." The thought harrowing in its imprecise suggestion, carried a clear message: Palestinian children will need role models in peace time.

Enter, the image of distance runner Majed Ahu Maraheel. "I hope that anyone going to the Olympic Games is ready to talk with Palestinian children," the psychiatrist said, "I hope he'll tell them he is representing them in Atlanta, and that he needs their emotional support. It would he a great opportunity to help our children to link their heroes with peace.

This observation might have seemed a commonplace but why didn't Dr El Masri speak of it publicly? "Palestinians," he replied, "are sceptical of psychiatrists."

The walker Ali Deeb, in Cairo, obviously can play little part as a role model for Palestinian children and in sports terms, the link between Gaza and the West Bank is weak. Still other Gaza sportsmen are held in high regard for instance, footballers scattered throughout the Arab world but few at home are as much admired as weightlifter Mahammad AlMadhoun (22), the pride of the Olympic Star Club in the Jabalia refugee camp at the edge of Gaza City.

We had arranged to photograph the young weightlifter against the backdrop of Palestine Square, the city's politically potent landmark, but the suicide bombers, struck Jerusalem and Askelon on, the day of the appointment. AlMadhoun didn't show up. "I think he has decided it wouldn't be wise," our "fixer" speculated. "Hamas martyrs to be are often photographed at Palestine Square before they go off on their last missions.

Seeking Al Madhoun in the narrow bumpy dirt streets of Jabalia, a camp noted for its," Hamas sympathies, we were overtaken by two speeding Palestinian police cars. Suddenly, they lurched to a stop in a plume of dust. An Arab woman wash bought from her house and, in a bizarre image, she was handed a cellular telephone and told to calls her son at Gaza's Islamic University. As she had claimed, he was there in class and the police departed, eliminating one name from their list of suspected suicide bombers.

Al Madhoun was at the Olympic Club, an unfinished cement block building with a stairway leading to open sky. His brother, a local martyr, had been killed by Israeli soldiers and he himself, bore a tell tale badge of courage on his scalp. His mood, however, seemed one of beating swords into ploughshares. "My pain comes from my parents, he said, dusting his hands before lifting his barbell. "My struggle now is in sport. I'm not interested in war, I'm interested in beating Israelis in weightlifting."

The day was dying. The light was poor. The nimble young weightlifter was delighted to climb to the roof of his club to pose for a panoramic shot of the dusty, sprawling refugee camp. He had just snatched his barbell to a locked arms overhead position for the third time when, all at once, the Palestinian police appeared below, shouting and shaking their fists like so many Keystone Cops. What were we doing photographing the open courtyard of the police station behind them?

They'd made their point. In an embattled land, organised sport - if not child's play - was ludicrous. It was time to go and later, as we waited for clearance through the checkpoint at Erez, I pictured Abu Maraheel, the distance runner, sitting barefoot on a mat in his house. On the wall behind him, beside the Hag, the ceramic plate bore a famous passage from the Koran. The Arabic words seemed appropriate to his and to Palegine's Olympic aspirations. "In the name of Allah," it read, "the Merciful, the Compassionate, I begin."