MIDDLE EAST: The gates to the open prison that is the Gaza Strip were flung open and people streamed in both directions across its southern border with Egypt yesterday, many visiting relatives not seen for years.
Palestinian and Egyptian troops stood by while thousands of Gazans took advantage of the second day of free access at this desert frontier which, until early Monday, was tightly-guarded by Israeli troops.
With the completion of Israel's withdrawal of its troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians milled back and forth through gaps in the looming eight-metre/28ft-high concrete frontier which until two days ago they would not have dared approach for fear of being shot. They drifted across the 14km-long [ 8½miles] buffer zone, known as the Philadelphi route, where Israel has in recent years concentrated its military efforts against militants smuggling weapons from Egypt into the volatile Palestinian territory.
People of all ages clambered over the 1.8m (6ft) concrete wall marking the Egyptian side of the border, hauling back to Gaza with them cheap food and cigarettes, blankets, floor mats, furniture, and even some sheep.
Egyptian Salah Saadi Il Gasas (30) and his Palestinian wife were taking their one-year-old daughter Hanine to introduce her to relatives in Khan Younis, Gaza's second largest city.
The couple brought on their surprise visit a present of a box of washing powder which is cheaper in Egypt than Gaza. "I'm so happy and my wife is so happy because she hasn't seen her family for over a year," said Salah.
Despite its pull-out this week from the Gaza Strip which it has occupied for 38 years, Israel retains complete control over all Palestinian movement in and out of the coastal enclave, and last week closed the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border which is Gaza's only direct outlet to the world.
Although Palestinians who were routinely denied permission by Israel to travel through the Rafah crossing, were free yesterday to take alternative routes, Egypt, which has inherited the job of policing the border against infiltrators and weapons smugglers, said yesterday the unregulated crossings would end today.
Perhaps nowhere is the relief of the Israeli evacuation more keenly felt than in the frontier town of Rafah, spliced in two by the border and bounded by Israeli free-fire zones to its south.
Since the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada five years ago, Israeli troops demolished some 1,600 homes in the Rafah area in operations it said were to seal off smuggling tunnels, but which human rights groups deplored as collective punishment and war crimes.
The bullet-riddled facades of the houses in Rafah which face the border are testimony to the fraught lives of residents who lived daily with the fear of being fired upon from Israeli watchtowers perched atop sand ridges.
Yesterday, girls from Rafah's UN school skipped along these ridges and examined the concrete remains of the Gurit lookout tower from where their former schoolmate was pumped with Israeli bullets last October.
Marianne Abu Rus (13) was part of a gaggle of students on an outing close to where Iman Al Hams (13) had strayed before she was shot dead.
This slaying only hit the headlines in Israel after soldiers were so disturbed and concerned that it would be covered up that they contacted the media.