Can He Stop the Killing?

摘要

When jalal sharaf casts his vote for a new Palestinian President this Sunday, he won't pay much attention to the candidates' positions on Israel or the future of the peace process. Sharaf, 41, has worked only six months since the beginning of the intifadeh in September 2000. He lives with his wife and eight children in a shack on Block 4 of the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza. They subsist on $7 a day scrounged from relatives. Desperate though it sounds, the family's predicament is hardly rare in Gaza's slums—and it is why Sharaf plans to vote for Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leading candidate to succeed Yasser Arafat as President of the Palestinian Authority.