This is the home of the al-Durrah family, unremarkable people transformed into modern-day icons when their son, Mohammed, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the very first days of the Palestinian revolt last year. Mohammed was 12 years old when he was killed on September 30, two days after the start of this second intifada. Within hours, the world was familiar with the final 40 minutes of his life, captured by a Palestinian cameraman for French television: the mask of terror on the face of a child, the convulsive twitches from each new round, and then the gradual loosening of the dying boy's grip on his father, Jamal.
Jamal al-Durrah and his wife, Amal, have been immersed in those scenes ever since, their sitting room plastered with images of Mohammed: cowering in his father's arms in propaganda posters; smiling in childhood snapshots; and serious in a large portrait in pastels donated by an Egyptian artist.
His death has been re-broadcast relentlessly by the Palestinian authorities on the television that is almost like an extra member of the family, and his short life has been re-lived in excruciating detail for the countless reporters, television crews, and dignitaries who have made their way here, drawn by the cult of the first child martyr of the intifada.
"I feel like he died only yesterday," says his mother, Amal. But while the constant attention makes it impossible to move beyond the first stages of grieving, she says she takes comfort in Mohammed's posthumous celebrity, and finds herself drawn irresistibly to the images of his death on TV.
"Even if they are horrible pictures, he was my son, and I still like to look at him," she says. "All the world saw Mohammed dying on television, and all the mothers felt that this child was their baby. When he died, he awakened the world, and so I think it was worth it."
Mohammed's father, Jamal, was hit by 12 bullets. He emerged from four months in a Jordanian hospital with a withered right hand, a slight limp, and a burning sense of mission.
"I believed in the struggle before the death of Mohammed," he says. "The main difference is that I have turned myself into an ambassador to tell the world about our struggle."
That sense of calling has taken the al-Durrahs - who had only left the Gaza Strip on one occasion before Mohammed's death, and who still do not own a telephone - to Egypt, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, and the anti-racism conference in South Africa last month. Their home - a standard refugee shelter with a corrugated asbestos roof - is sparsely furnished with plastic chairs and badly scarred wooden divans.
But there are reports they have received thousands of dollars from well-wishers in the Arab world, in addition to the obligatory $220 a month pension doled out by the Palestinian Authority to the families of victims, and the $10,000 cheque from Saddam Hussein. Some of the donations paid for a marble headstone for Mohammed. An unemployed labourer before his son's death, Jamal muses about establishing a foundation for children with disabilities, or maybe a scholarship fund for needy university students.
Meanwhile, he and his wife have been consumed by the whirlwind of the past year. As they speak, their six surviving children pummel each other and scream, but fail to attract their parents' attention. The neighbours say they have run wild for the past year.
The celebrity, and their understandable bitterness at Mohammed's death, has also steeled the al-Durrahs' hearts against any chance of a compromise with Israel. To Jamal's mind, the carnage in New York and Washington on September 11 was a product of the Israeli secret service, Mossad, a theory he is willing to expound on at some length. Ask Mohammed's mother and father if they would be willing to contemplate living in a Palestinian state made up of the West Bank and Gaza, with Israelis as their neighbours, and both reply: "We must have all of Palestine."
Tomorrow, it will be exactly a year since the eruption of the violent Palestinian rising, which followed the provocative visit of the then hardline opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, to the hallowed ground in Jerusalem revered by Muslims as the Haram as-Sharif, and by Jews as the Temple Mount, site of two destroyed biblical temples. Since then, more than 750 people have been killed, including scores of children - Arab and Jewish - many far younger than Mohammed.
The spot where he was killed - Netzarim junction, a crossroads presided over by a hunkering Israeli army position - is unrecognisable. The concrete barrel where Mohammed and his father sought cover was destroyed by the Israeli army a few days after his death, along with a shack belonging to the Palestinian security forces. Two blocks of flats overlooking the Israeli army camp were razed later. In the man-made wasteland that remains, a lone Israeli tank now prowls, and a machine-gun nest looms from a mound directly opposite the spot where Mohammed was killed.
So what has the revolt won for the Palestinians? "There are no political solutions in the air as we enter the second year of the intifada," says Hussain Sheikh, the commander of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation in the West Bank. He says the uprising has achieved three broad aims: it has roused the international community to the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza; it has exposed claims that Israel was willing to make painful concessions for a peaceful settlement of the Middle East dispute; and it brought renewed scrutiny to the role of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza as the focal points of conflict.
What Sheikh does not say, however, is that the primary accomplishment of the uprising was achieved with the images of Mohammed's death, when international sympathy for the Palestinians was never higher. The impact of those images was acknowledged by the Israeli authorities. Ever since, the army has stubbornly tried to promote an alternative explanation for Mohammed's death - that he and his father were in fact targeted by Palestinian gunmen.
The death of Mohammed did not stop other children from being killed. By the time the first reporters descended on the al-Durrah's home, the uprising had claimed an even younger victim than Mohammed: Sara al-Haq, a chubby two-year-old with copper-coloured ringlets, shot dead in her village near the West Bank city of Nablus. Instead, the killing of children has, in a way, defined the intifada, feeding the cult of martyrdom that has engulfed children cut down while throwing stones at Israeli tanks and, most ominously, the suicide bombers who have carried out dozens of attacks on Jewish civilians.
It has also provoked a macabre competition between Arab and Jew to claim the youngest victim of the revolt. According to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, 140 of the Palestinian victims of the uprising have been under the age of 18 - or about a quarter of the entire toll. The Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, counts 127 minors among the dead. Twenty eight Israeli children have been killed - including 22 who were blown up by suicide bombers inside the Jewish state. Yesterday there was still one more casualty: a 16-year-old Palestinian stonethrower shot in the head by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip, three miles from the spot where Yasser Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, were holding ceasefire talks.
In his iconic status among Palestinians, Mohammed al-Durrah now has a counterpart in a Jewish baby girl, Shalhavet Pass, who was shot dead in her stroller at the gates of the Jewish settlement in Hebron. She was 10 months old. Shalhavet's chubby face now stares out of websites, T-shirts, and amulets produced by the Hebron settlers in her memory.
However, the youngest Jewish victim of the uprising is Yehuda Shoham, aged five months, who died from wounds sustained when a rock was thrown at his family's car near the West Bank settlement of Shilo on June 6. The youngest Palestinian victim was not killed by Israeli soldiers, but by Jewish extremists. Diya Tmeizi, a three-month-old baby boy, who was born after his parents underwent a decade of fertility treatment, was shot dead with two other Palestinians when their car came under fire as they were returning from a wedding in Idna village, near Hebron, on July 20 this year.
Other children have died unremembered - as has a principal actor in the drama surrounding Mohammed al-Durrah's death: the ambulance driver, Bassem al-Bilbeisi, who was shot dead trying to rescue father and son. "I hear the al-Durrah family got money and has become famous now," says Hanan al-Bilbeisi, his widow, who says she and her 11 children have been reduced to penury by his death. "I know money is no compensation for losing a child, but I wish we could have been given a chance to have our say in the media. My husband also deserves to be known."
Those hundreds of dead - the celebrities such as Mohammed and the overlooked such as al-Bilbeisi - are the reason most widely cited by Palestinians for their unwillingness to go along with the ceasefire declared last week by the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. How can they give up now when so many have died?
Sharon and Arafat have been made well aware that Washington does not want their conflict to intrude on its efforts to forge a broad war coalition, and that it cannot recruit Arab states so long as the intifada continues to rage.
Last week's truce was the fifth declared so far, but people had given it a breath of hope because of the unprecedented pressure from Washington for it to succeed. For some Palestinian leaders, who admit the intifada has brought them no closer to their aims, the ceasefire is a last, unexpected chance: they can abandon the largely military means by which the uprising has been fought, and return to mass protests. They realise they can hardly expect the international community to pay attention to their regional conflict when the world is transfixed by the attack on the US, and the awaited reprisal. Fifteen Palestinians were killed in the 24 hours that followed the carnage in the US; their deaths provoked little international comment.
The Palestinian leadership is also terrified that if they do not rein in the militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, there could well be another suicide attack inside the Jewish state - an eventuality that, in the present international atmosphere, could destroy for ever support for the Palestinians. However, Palestinians officials also say the ceasefire is tenuous, and the region could easily explode once more unless the truce produces real gains, such as an end to Israel's suffocating siege of the West Bank and Gaza.
"If the situation remains like this, we will have very many people who will want to die, especially if Sharon stays in his closed mentality, and remains opposed to any negotiations on a final settlement," says General Abdul Razak Majaida, the head of Palestinian security in the West Bank and Gaza, and the enforcer of the ceasefire. His security forces are also going to have to deal with popular resentment at Arafat's Palestinian Authority for making heroes of some of the dead - such as Mohammed - while others remain forgotten. Many Palestinians feel betrayed by their leaders.
But most of all they are going to have to convince a people who have surrounded themselves with images of their dead children to overcome the hatred that now rules their hearts. Emblazoned on the wall of his home, beneath the mural of the dying Mohammed, is a slogan evidently painted on with the al-Durrahs' approval. It says: "What was taken by force can only be returned by force."
