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The vast parking lot was deserted Monday as Khalil Rabba stepped out of the marble-and-glass terminal building at the Erez crossing from Gaza.

The honking and hollering that usually greets visitors has been silenced since Nov. 5, when Israel closed off all entry into and exit from the Gaza Strip after a series of mortar and rocket attacks from inside Gaza.

The silence seemed deafening to the 49-year-old Jerusalem resident, one of only a handful of people allowed to pass through Erez on Monday: Mr. Rabba is blind. He had been allowed a four-day visit to his family at the Shaati refugee camp after the death of his brother. He had to wait a week for the approval. “Almost everyone had gone home by the time I arrived,” he complained.

During his brief stay, Mr. Rabba found his family living in miserable conditions. “The only time they had electricity was from midnight until dawn,” he said. The Israeli blockade has meant less fuel for some of the generators on which Gaza's 11/2 million people depend. “And the water was so salty, I couldn't drink it,” he added. “I didn't even want to shower in it.”

Except for four humanitarian relief shipments, Israel has kept Gaza sealed for a month.

A five-month period of “quiet” was ended Nov. 4 when Israeli forces detected what they said was a tunnel being constructed under the Gaza border. They moved into Gaza to destroy it and, in the process, six Palestinians were killed. That led to Hamas's rocket response, the border closing, and a tit-for-tat exchange since then.

Karen AbuZayd, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said the human toll has been the greatest in years. “It's been closed for so much longer than ever before … and we have nothing in our warehouses. … It will be a catastrophe if this persists.”

But Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni says: “The rules about Gaza are clear. … If there is quiet and the time is not used to prepare the next attack, then Israel will give quiet in return. But if the citizens of Israel are attacked, Israel will respond with force in order to defend them.”

Many Israelis would say the five-month ceasefire wasn't even all that quiet.

“We still had the occasional rocket fired at us,” said Smadar Schnelovitz, whose community of Netiv Haasara sits only 400 metres from the northern end of Gaza. “You never knew when one was going to come.”

Three years ago, a rocket did hit home, killing a 22-year-old woman sitting on her parents' porch. Just on Saturday, another rocket hit and destroyed a greenhouse.

However, on this sunny day, the comforts of the idyllic community seem far removed from the misery of Gaza. Gardens here are well tended, the streets are clean; it's garbage-collection day and everyone's bins are on the curbside. There's even a colourful stone wall at one end of the community that hides the view of the barbed wire-and-concrete barrier that is the Gaza border.

Netiv Haasara was founded in 1983 by people forced to leave another community in occupied Sinai when Israel returned the area to Egypt as part of a treaty.

Ms. Schnelovitz was one of the founders of both communities. She points to the concrete shelter built alongside the school bus stop. “That's how we have to live,” she said. Beyond rockets, she added: “I'm afraid they'll build a tunnel that'll come up right here.”

Kerem Shalom has experience with tunnels. Located 30 metres from the Gaza Strip and 1,005 metres from the Egyptian border, the kibbutz (its name means vineyard of peace) is next to the spot where Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted by Hamas fighters 21/2 years ago. Since then, conditions have deteriorated greatly between Gaza and Israel, and Kerem Shalom comes under frequent mortar attack.

Founded eight years ago by a group that wanted to recreate the principles of sharing and peace exemplified by earlier kibbutzim, Kerem Shalom struggles to survive. Its farmland is overrun by Israeli tanks, its peace is mostly gone.

Jay CarniHardes, a turkey farmer by day, has been the kibbutz's security chief for four years. An “army brat” from the United States, he says he's the most right-wing guy in the community of 48.

“There's never going to be peace,” he said. “You've got two people fighting for the same land – it's impossible.”

Why did he come here, then? “For the quiet,” he says, and laughs. “This place is really beautiful and, in every day, you've got half an hour of hell and 231/2 hours of heaven.”

Nahal Oz had more than half an hour of hell last Friday when that kibbutz along the middle of the Strip witnessed a rocket attack, in which eight soldiers were hit and wounded. One lost a leg.

Built in 1951, Nahal Oz first housed “young pioneers,” former soldiers who chose to live next to Egyptian-occupied Gaza, from where Palestinian fighters frequently launched raids against Israel.

Today, the kibbutz agenda is peace. Yoram Ziv, the secretary, has been here since 1963. “We don't like the closing of Gaza,” he said. “We want to help those people. If only they'd stop shooting at us.”

But neither side is likely to stop until the terms of a new ceasefire are worked out. Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian cabinet minister, wrote this week in the online journal www.bitterlemons.org that Israel wants to use the renewed hostilities to extract better terms from Hamas – the release of Mr. Shalit, for example, and greater control over Gaza's border with Egypt – and to let Israel's Defence Minister and Labour Party Leader Ehud Barak “improve his public standing.”

These days, conflict such as this is what passes for politics.