UNICEF and the Humanitarian Aid Department of the European Commission have established teams of social workers and psychologists to respond to the children's needs. Every month they reach some 3,000 children and their families, offering support and counselling after violent incidents.

The counselling sessions end every month with a festival and beach party organized by UNICEF and its partners, where thousands of children are given the chance to play and interact with each other away from the conflict.

"These festivals are important because they are about protecting childhood," UNICEF Special Representative for Gaza and the West Bank Dan Rohrmann said. "It's an opportunity for children to be children, which is rare here in Gaza, because they live in an environment of extraordinary fear and violence and insecurity."

The new rifles brandished by the Fatah foot soldiers are a sign of the arms race that many allege is quietly raging between Fatah and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As the two parties have publicly jostled for power they have also set about stealthily arming themselves, say observers, intelligence officials and party leaders, in preparation for a confrontation that seems to be drawing nearer with each fallen militant.

In recent days 12 people have died in the latest bout of cross-faction clashes that have simmered throughout the summer.

"They're buying all these guns so now they're going to have to use them or what's the point?" says Zahi.

Though there are few hard numbers, there is a prevailing impression on the Palestinian street that there are more weapons in general today than there were just one year ago.

"When you see 50 cars filled with gunmen, in a protest march in Ramallah as we did last week, you conclude that there are more weapons coming in," says Khalil Shaheen, a senior editor with the Ramallah-based Al-Ayam daily.

Hamas began its arms drive to counter Fatah's monopoly of the Palestinian security services. It has deployed a private army, the so-called Executive Force, in the streets of Gaza and is rumored to be readying a similar force for the West Bank.

The Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, has benefited from US and Israeli efforts to undermine the Hamas government.

On Thursday the New York Times reported that the United States had proposed expanding Abbas' presidential guard from 3,500 men to 6,000 as part of a $26 million plan to strengthen the moderate Palestinian leader.

In Gaza, shooting deaths, accidental and otherwise, and deaths from mishandled explosives are on the rise, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

Locally manufactured rocket-propelled grenades, once a rare sight, are now as common as the ubiquitous Kalashnikov.

Hamas' struggles with Fatah, however, are not the only factor driving the arms drive, Shaheen says. Hamas' uncompromising stance toward Israel and its June capture of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, claimed along with Palestinian factions, have brought it into direct confrontation with the Jewish state.

"After seeing Hizbullah's success against Israel, Hamas and other factions want to repeat this experience here," he says. "The factions are preparing for confrontation with Israel as much as for a confrontation with each other."

Israeli military officials have sounded similar alarm bells, telling the Israeli daily Yediot Ahranot recently that Hamas was channeling arms and money into a 7,500-man strong army consisting of rocket units, anti-tank units and sniper squads, capable of taking on the Israeli Army.

Hamas responded Sunday by claiming its forces were twice that size.

Tawfiq al-Tirawi, head of the Palestinian intelligence service, paints a dire picture of Hamas' growing arms stores. Since coming to power, Tirawi says, Hamas has amassed "millions of bullets, many tons of explosives, thousands of RPGs, and thousands of assault rifles."

"We are already at the beginning of a civil war, no doubt about it. They (Hamas) are accumulating weapons and a full-scale civil war can break out at any moment," said Tirawi.

Abbas's attempts to form a coalition between the two Palestinian groups collapsed last week after he insisted Hamas must recognise Israel and give up violence. Abbas believes recognising Israel is the only way to secure the release of millions of pounds of European Union and US aid frozen since Hamas won elections in January.

Tirawi believes Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel and said a violent showdown was inevitable. "No way can they agree. They are preparing for a war against us," he said. Last week 12 people were killed as fighting between the two groups escalated.

According to Palestinian sources, Abbas has notified the US, Jordan and Egypt that he is preparing to take action against Hamas. Egypt has already indicated it would support him, the sources claim.

Tirawi is determined not to let Hamas ruin the faint chance of a peace agreement with Israel. While Hamas is believed to have 8,000 fighters, Fatah sources claim 20,000. Tirawi forecasts that the violence would begin in Gaza and spread to the West Bank.

Large quantities of weapons and ammunition have been smuggled from the Egyptian-controlled Sinai into the Gaza Strip since Israel withdrew from the area last year, according to Palestinian sources. Most of the arms are carried through dozens of tunnels, many controlled by Hamas.

Many of the weapons are believed to originate in the countries in the region that support Hamas, such as Iran and Syria. Egypt is trying to prevent the smuggling but has achieved only limited success, according to Israeli sources.

Tirawi rejected the possibility that by accumulating weapons Hamas is preparing for a war against Israel. The arsenal was to be used against Fatah, he insisted.

According to a report for the Reuters news agency, a round-the-clock effort was going on at an abandoned lot of 16,000 sq. meters in the city of Jericho to put up the proposed camp that, according to American estimates, would cost 20 million dollars.

European diplomats were quoted as saying that the money will be enough to install a similar camp in the densely populated Gaza Strip, adding that elements of the Force-17 of PA chief Mahmoud Abbas were "growing in number and quality".

The diplomats opined that Washington will pay half of the cost while Europeans and a number of Arab countries will cover the rest of the amount, asserting that American officials were pushing Israel to allow more munitions supplies to Abbas' forces.

Assistants of Keith Dayton, the American security coordinator in Ramallah, were courting more European countries to finance the "suspicious" project as he toured the camp with Dutch diplomats who later revealed that Holland prefers to support Abbas in a "different way".

As reports in this regard persisted, sources in the PA presidential guards acknowledged that American military teams were secretly training the Force-17 elements over the past two months in another but smaller secret camp in the city, and that the training course will end in January next year.

The sources further unveiled that Abbas had requested more military supplies for his forces during his latest visit to Washington, especially after the short-lived mutiny carried out by vandal elements in the PA security apparatuses, including the presidential guards against the legitimate PA elected government.

Not long after Hamas Movement won the Palestinian legislative elections and formed the new PA government, IOF troops escorted trucks loaded with M16 rifles and huge amount of munitions coming from Jordan and unloaded them in the Force-17 stores in Ramallah and Gaza cities.

Israeli premier Ehud Olmert who endorsed the supplies explained, "I did that because we are running out of time and need Abbas' help".

Four more fully loaded trucks bound to that Force had crossed Wednesday the Kerem Shalom crossing point under the watching eye of the IOF troops guarding that terminal.

The Quds Press news agency that unmasked the new munitions supplies affirmed that they were stored in the PA security apparatuses' complex known as "Ansar2".

Both Olmert and the US secretary of state had championed bolstering Abbas' force and influence in the PA-run lands with "all available means".

But Hamas deputy in the PLC Ismail Al-Ashkar, secretary of the security and interior committee in the Palestinian legislature, considered any ammunitions supplies to the PA security apparatuses outside the law as "illegal", adding that external dictates weren't in favor of the Palestinian people.

"If there are negotiations on our entry into the government, and we decide that we want to join, it will take an hour or two," he said.

Mr Lieberman's party surprised many political pundits when it won 11 seats in March with an uncompromisingly anti-Arab electoral message that included a commitment to redraw Israel's borders to exclude large Arab Israeli towns.

Any deal with Mr Lieberman would sound the death knell for Mr Olmert's plan to withdraw from part of the occupied West Bank.

While this was central to the Kadima manifesto, Israel Our Home would never give its backing.

Mr Olmert's current coalition unites his Kadima party with Labour, a pensioners' rights party and the ultra-religious Shas party.

The constant crimes against the Palestinians alone have been raging for more than 50 years. For five decades, much of the rest of the world has tacitly accepted the occupying warlords' self-justification for murder, dispossession, theft, destruction, assassinations and torture of Palestinians.

Why the tacit acceptance of these crimes when the justification is that an Israeli life is worth 200 Talmudic times the life of a Palestinian? Where have the voices of the righteous been while these atrocities have been committed in the guise of defence?

Forty-four innocent children have been massacred in Gaza after two or three Israeli military were killed by Hamas. All of this hatred was visited upon the innocent while Lebanon burned and the world's presses rang out with condemnation of Hezbollah.

Here are just a few of the reported casualties of tribal murder in Gaza:
Bara Nasser Habib, aged three (hit by shrapnel to the head and body, Gaza City, 26 July 2006)
Shahed Saleh Al-Sheikh Eid, three days old (bled to death after airstrike, Al-Shouka, 4 August 2006)
Rajaa Salam Abu Shaban, aged three (died of fractured skull in air raid, Gaza City, 9 August 2006 )
Khaled Nidal Wahba, 15 months old (died of wounds from an airstrike, 10 July 2006)
Rawan Farid Hajjaj, aged six (killed with his mother and sister in an airstrike, Gaza City, 8 July 2006)
These are only a few of a multitude of babies slaughtered by indiscriminate tribal hatred of Israelis for Palestinians. Are these children less human or less deserving of life than their Semitic counterparts?

Ordinary apathetic Americans don't know and don't care what happens to these "ferners". As with the massacred in Darfur, foreign children are not children, but numbers. They're mere data that the news reports play with to convince the masses that the media is concerned about what happens in the world. They're not!

The media doesn't show pictures of these slaughtered babies because revelations of that kind of truth might, according to the devils in the administration, fuel terrorism.

When someone like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stands at the podium in the UN and calls G.W. Bush a devil, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd labels Chavez "a world-class nutbar". She can, and does, call Bush names herself, but the Venezuelan president isn't allowed to speak such truths.

What made Chavez "a world-class nutbar" Maureen? Was it his statement that "The immoral veto of the United States allowed the Israelis, with impunity, to destroy Lebanon. Right in front of all of us as we stood there watching, a resolution in the council was prevented?" She didn't say. She simply labelled Chavez a nutbar.

Perhaps Dowd faulted Chavez because he recommended Noam Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. Chomsky's is one voice in the wilderness trying to rein in the evil forces of conquering warlords. Where are the rest?

Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have made, and are still making, a great effort to speak out against the Israeli lobbyists who control the US Congress and the media through their organized Israeli-first campaigns. But where are the rest?

The Internet allows a few, mostly unheard, voices to broadcast truths to small, select audiences of little consequence. But where are the hundreds - nay thousands - of voices of the intellectuals of America who should know better and who should speak out?

Professors, ministers, attorneys, medical professionals, judges: I'm ashamed of you! Have you lost all sense of civic responsibility? Or do you simply sleep or play while the business profiteers and the lords of war murder and maim and massacre innocents in your names?

Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for 38 years. http://www.pballes.com

Yousuf M. Suleiman is a school teacher of 30 years from the southern West Bank town of Hebron. He has a family of eight but can hardly get things "under control" when it comes to securing the basic needs such as flour, sugar and rice.

"I really don't know what to tell you. Would you believe me if I told you that last week we didn't have bread for three days?" said Suleiman, with a clearly subdued voice.

Suleiman, like the rest of the estimated 170,000 Palestinian public employees and civil servants, has not received his salary for the seventh consecutive month due to the financial blockade imposed by Israel, the US and EU on the Hamas-led government.

The government has paid "advance payments" amounting to 50-60% of the regular salaries. However, the meager and irregularly-paid sums have not made much of a difference for most Palestinian families, especially during Ramadan when family spending increases substantially.

So how do these poverty-stricken families make do? How do they explain to the children the sudden and unprecedented poverty haunting them?

Akram Hussein is a Palestinian policeman, with a wife and two small children. He says that all the "tricks and innovations" he has been devising to overcome the financial problem are being exhausted.

"Now the nearby grocery store won't give us on credit any more. He says he will go bankrupt himself if he keeps selling things on credit. And I must say he is right.

"Sometimes I tell the kids that the money is in the bank but the bank is now closed, but they often squeeze me with all kinds of questions which expose the trick."

Asked what he is going to do, Hussein looks heavenward, saying the solution is God's hands.

Charities

Palestinian families who don't have the basic foods, such as flour and sugar, are normally helped by the local Zakat (Alms) committees. However, the assistance is getting more meager and more irregular and can hardly make up for the unpaid salaries which nobody knows when they will be paid in full.

Samir Rabi'e is a clerk at the local Zakat committee in Dura, 10 miles south west of Hebron. He says that demands on food has been greater than ever.

"Now we have a lot of previously well-to-do people asking for assistance. This is not a natural situation, it is induced poverty imposed by the Americans and the Israelis for political reasons."

Rabai'e complained that Israel and the Americans "won't give us mercy and won't allow God's mercy to reach us," citing a Palestinian proverb.

"And the rich Arab states prefer to heed America's demands rather than shield Palestinian children from the ghoul of starvation."

He pointed out that the US, acting on Israel's behalf, has bullied the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, to prevent Muslim donors from sending their charity to the occupied territories.

"Now we mostly rely on local sources which are scarce, meager and can't really meet the huge and growing demand."

Another Zakat official in Bethlehem, who wouldn't give his name for security reasons, urged Muslims to bypass government control mechanisms and help the Palestinians face "this criminals and cruel siege by the enemies of Islam."

" Please, send your charity money and donations to your brothers and sisters in Palestine. Don't wait for your governments' approval because your governments are likely to be mere puppets of the United States and Israel.

" We must never reach a situation where we need a permission from the Americans to practice our religions. If helping a starving child in Rafah or Nablus is terror, then let all of us be terrorists."

Bread and tea

There are many Palestinian families whose honor and pride won't allow them to ask for food openly and publicly, even from the Zakat committees.

These, said Rabi'e, are suffering silently.

"I personally know families that break their fast at the end of the day on bread and tea. It is these people who need particular attention."

According to some sources, there are already early signs of malnutrition among children public schools.

"Physically the signs are not conspicuous, but we notice that many children can't concentrate or are absent-minded, this could be the result of children not having sufficient nutrition," said a Hebron school principal.

He said schools couldn't do much about the problem other than writing reports to the ministry of education.

Catastrophe in Gaza

Israel is not only impoverishing and starving Palestinian by denying them access to food and work, but is actually killing them in droves and on a daily basis.

Indeed, not a day passes without a number of Palestinians getting killed and maimed in Gaza where an average of three to five Palestinians, most of them innocent civilians, are killed on any given day.

On the fifth day of Ramadan, an Israeli tank fired an artillery shell at a northern Gaza home, killing two teenage brothers. That was the "perfect" Ramadan gift by Israel to that Gazan family. And more and more "gifts" of this kind are in the offing, as indicated by the Israeli Chief of Staff, Dan Haluts, who said he slept well the night he ordered the dropping of a one-ton bomb on a Gaza apartment building in 2002, killing 12 sleeping children.

As usual in such circumstances, the Israeli army claimed that "two terrorists" were killed. The concocted lie was readily and blithely carried by western news agencies and then quoted by media around the world. So, the innocent is killed and the story of their murder is also killed.

According to figures compiled by human rights organizations and the Palestinian Health Ministry, the Israeli occupation army has killed more than 226 Palestinians in Gaza alone since June 25 when Palestinian guerillas abducted an Israeli occupation solider near Rafah. Hundreds others, mostly children and innocent civilians, have also been maimed and injured by indiscriminate Israeli bombing and bombardments.

Moreover, the Israeli air-force bombed and utterly destroyed the bulk of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, very much like it to the Lebanese infrastructure during the recent war with Hizbullah.

The "targets" included schools, colleges, bridges, office buildings, and ordinary homes in addition to the only power station in Gaza the destruction of which plunged Gaza into darkness. The local authorities in Gaza have sought desperately to partially solve the problem by importing electricity from Egypt and alternating electricity supplies to various localities, thus enabling Gazans to have a few hours of electricity supply per day.

Israel normally justifies its massive bombings of Palestinian homes and neighborhoods by security considerations. However, the utter disproportionality and vengefulness of the bombings suggest that Israel is only interested in making as many Palestinians as possible suffer. Maybe Israelis are after all emulating their former tormentors? Well, haven't they been doing that all along, some would say?

This year, the Israeli army has introduced a novel tactic of terrorizing Gaza citizens. It is the Telephone terror whereby Israeli shin Beth agents telephone a given Palestinian family to tell them that their home would be bombed within five minutes and that they would be killed if they didn't leave immediately.

The evil calls normally are made in the quiet hours before dawn and are designed to inflict maximal terror on the families who are forced to jump out of their beds onto the streets, only to see their homes and their belongings and everything destroyed by air-to-ground missiles fired by indifferent Jewish hands.

This week, when a home was bombed this way, some revelers came to see what was going on, only to be greeted by another salvo of bombs raining from the sky. A girl of 14 years was instantly killed by shrapnel. Ten others children were injured, one seriously.

According to Israeli sources, the Israeli goal in Gaza, and to a lesser extent in the West Bank, is to generate an explosive implosion among Palestinians, so much so that they would begin to kill each other.

The experiment, using the term used by veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass, has succeeded.

Last week, as many as 14 Palestinians were killed in internal disturbances ignited by the claustrophobic siege on the estimated 1.5 million Gazans who are barred from accessing food and work and are effectively confined to a pressure cooker.

And when Israeli officials are confronted with the question of how they could allow themselves to starve and torment the prisoner population, who are still practically under the Israeli occupation since Israel still controls rather tightely all Gaza's border crossings, the officials simply shrug their shoulders and invoke the mantra of terror as if starving innocent people were not a criminal act of terror itself.

This week, visiting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, instead of treating the situation in Gaza in particular and the occupied territories in general as a humanitarian disaster, congratulated her Israeli counterpart Tsibi Livni on the "success" and "effectiveness" of the Israeli-American sanctions against the prisoner Palestinian population.

With this moral depravity and criminal hypocrisy, unseen since Hitler's armies surrounded Ghetto Warsaw during the Second World War, Palestinian suffering is even likely to exacerbate.

And the world is also likely to keep silent, just as did then.

This is how Ramadan looks like in Gaza in 2006.