After ceasefire, Gazans dream of reopened airport

A file picture taken on August 18, 2014 shows a Palestinian boy picking flowers in front of the destroyed and deserted main gate of Gaza Strips’ former international airport in the southern town of Rafah. AFP/Gaza CityStanding in front of the crumbling control tower of Gaza's devastated airport, one-time air traffic controller Anis Arafat dreams of the day planes will land and take off here again.  Re-opening this airport, closed since 2001, and ending Gaza's isolation is a key demand of the Islamist Hamas movement and was at the heart of the 50-day Gaza-Israel conflict that ended with a ceasefire last week. Once a symbol of Palestinian hopes for statehood, the Yasser Arafat or Dahaniya international airport has become a constant reminder that Gaza is largely cut off from the outside world. "The first place I worked after I finished my studies was the airport, it was the home that welcomed me and my colleagues. We lived as one family," said 37-year-old Arafat, who worked at the airport for two years before it closed. Looking out over what remains of the facility and its torn-up tarmac after years of bombardment and neglect, Arafat shook his head. "There was grass and gardens and roses and beautiful things. The window of my office was here," he said, visiting for the first time in a decade. "Honestly, they were good days." The opening of air and sea ports will be a major talking point when Egyptian-mediated negotiations between Israel and Hamas, which rules Gaza, resume after a month-long pause. For employees like Wassim al-Akhras, who worked in the control tower with Arafat, the reopening of the airport can't come soon enough. "When you see this building, and you see the ruins of Yasser Arafat International Airport, it brings tears to your eyes," he said. He said he was proud to work in a "symbol of sovereignty" for the Palestinians.  Close by, a young shepherd guided his small flock through the bombed-out interior of the arrivals hall and young men from the nearby town of Rafah picked through the debris for scrap metal to sell. The airport was built with funding from the international community and symbolically inaugurated in 1998 by then-US president Bill Clinton and the late Palestinian leader Arafat. Its opening came four years after the Oslo Accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians, when the sides were in peace talks. Flights run by Palestinian Airlines -- at the time equipped with three passenger aircraft -- left for Amman and Cairo, and during the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca planes ferried Palestinians to Saudi Arabia. Israeli forces hit the airport's radar tower in 2001 during the second intifada, when Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza launched an uprising against the Israeli occupation, forcing it to stop work. Further strikes reduced the airport's other buildings to rubble, with fierce fighting near the site in 2006 after Gaza militants snatched Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in a cross-border raid near the adjacent Kerem Shalom frontier crossing. The same year saw Israel begin its blockade of Gaza and residents have since faced deepening isolation. Crossings into Israel are very difficult and Gazans also face severe restrictions at the single crossing with Egypt at Rafah.