RAFAH AND GAZA CITY

Some came just to gawk, to be part of the moment. Some came to see family they hadn't seen for years. One family, heaving plastic suitcases, told me they were going to Norway. Most came to shop, returning with whatever they could carry or push.

But away from the delight and the novelty down in Rafah, life ground on.

In Gaza City, I watched, on Friday morning, as an ambulance driver pleaded, unsuccessfully, for a petrol pump attendant to choose his vehicle to fill with scarce fuel. In the end, he was given a meagre 20 litres.

At the market in Palestine Square, Khalil Shehada, a small, 50-year old man, with blinking, rheumy eyes, worked out that he had bought himself a bargain for the next month and a bit.

He smokes five or six cigarettes a day. The carton he had just bought from a scarred teenager cost him 100 shekels ($27). The day before it would have cost him 250 shekels ($68).

 
But Khalil could not bring himself to smile. "Some people are surviving here," he said, in a voice so quiet that it barely punctured the din of the market. "But most of us are going under."

Where Khalil was understated, Bashir Hallawa was furious.

Snaggle-toothed and bearded, he jabbed the air with his forefinger. "We built Israel!" he shouted.

Now 51 years old, Bashir had not had work, as a builder, for more than three years.

"Yes, the opening of the border is a release," he said. "But even if people go, they don't have money. Life in Gaza is hell. People need to work."

To the side of the market, there were smiles - nervous smiles, from 13-year-old Mohammed Kaly.

School was on holiday, and this was his first day as a salesman. Mohammed had been given two cartons of cigarettes by his father, who the previous day had bought a carton over the border in Egypt.

"My dad told me, instead of sitting around at home, to go out and sell."

I watched as Mohammed attempted a confident lunge inside a passing taxi.

Through the open window, he thrust his cigarette packets, and struck up a patter. The taxi driver slowly, carefully, lit his own cigarette, and drove off, without a word.

Mohammed straightened up, still smiling shyly. "With the money I make, we can buy food and pay our rent," he told me.

NOT POLICING THE BORDER

There are frustrations of a different nature, just up the road from Gaza, in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.

There sit the 42 remaining members of the European Union Border Assistance Mission.

With much fanfare from EU headquarters in Brussels, Eubam began its work, in November 2005, helping to monitor the Rafah crossing.

That was then. No-one from Eubam has been to Rafah since 13 June last year, when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip.

Over the last seven months, Eubam has slimmed its numbers from 90 to 42.

"We stand ready to go back at a moment's notice," Maria Telleria, the mission's press officer told me. "In the mean time, we wait in Ashkelon."

I suggested to one of the Eubam team that life must be frustrating.

"You can only go on so many day trips to the beach," came the reply. "These are highly trained senior police officers, away from their jobs, away from their families. What do you think?"

RAISING MONEY FOR GAZA

Quote of the week has to belong to Karen Abuzayd.

The Commissioner General for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency For Palestine Refugees wrote in the Guardian newspaper: "Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and - some would say - encouragement of the international community."

The day before, the UN had launched its largest ever appeal for money for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, calling on donors to provide US $462m (UK £233m).

"Part of me wonders why the international embargo (since Hamas won the Palestinian general elections two years ago) has cost the Palestinians hundreds of millions of dollars. We could have saved them and us a heap of money," one UN official told me.