Dispatches Meeting the Deadline

By LARA MARLOWE, in the Gaza Strip

The fire that consumed the stolen Chevrolet ambulance was so powerful that it vaporized the vehicle's upholstery, so there was not much left of Anwar Aziz, the man inside: only a carbonized corpse, its left foot dangling out the driver's door. Aziz would not have wanted it different, however, for he had set out that day to be Gaza's Dec. 13 martyr.

On Dec. 13, last Monday, real peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians was supposed to begin. That was the day on which, under the terms of the accord signed on the White House lawn in September, the Israelis were to start withdrawing troops from the Gaza Strip. The withdrawal has been delayed, but to demonstrate their scorn for the deadline before it had even passed, members of Islamic Jihad, an extremist Muslim fundamentalist group, decided to deploy a weapon only recently borrowed from Muslim radicals elsewhere -- the suicide car bomber. So early Monday morning at a highway intersection just outside the Gaza City limits, Aziz sped the ambulance toward an Israeli patrol. The soldiers opened fire, and the bullets ignited canisters of propane that Aziz had packed inside the auto. Three Israelis were slightly wounded.

"More people will side with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The p.l.o. has no power," said an unemployed agricultural worker in the crowd that watched Aziz's corpse being lifted from the blackened wreckage. Israeli soldiers holding assault rifles stood around the crossroads, where faded Palestinian flags drooped from the rooftops. "Get moving. Get off the streets," a loudspeaker on an Israeli jeep warned loiterers in Arabic.

In Jabaliya, the largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and the birthplace of the anti-Israeli intifadeh, Aziz's family and friends raised a tent for week-long mourning ceremonies. A militant wearing a black hood wielded an ax painted red. let slaughtering the jews be our road to paradise, read a banner on the tent. "We are jealous of Anwar," said one of Aziz's friends. "We feel like cowards because we have not yet done the same thing."

Aziz's mother Halima, 50, told how the family fled their home in the village of Simsim, just northeast of the Gaza Strip in Israel, when she was a little girl during the 1948 war. "Since 1948 we have never been happy," she said. "We have no land, no security, no hope, no future." When the Aziz family set up a small T shirt-printing shop in 1989, the Israeli occupation authorities imposed taxes she says they could not afford to pay. In 1991 Anwar was arrested as a suspected Islamic Jihad supporter, and spent two years in prison in the Negev desert. He was released only last April.

Aziz shared a four-room cement blockhouse with 16 relatives. The room he lived in with his wife and two young children is decorated with the wooden model of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque, which he completed in prison. Intissar, Aziz's 22-year-old widow, said, "The day of Anwar's martyrdom was the happiest day of our marriage."

With reporting by Jamil Hamad/the Gaza Strip