THE LAST Palestinian Airlines Flight PF1162 from Gaza international airport left at 12.30pm for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Late-arriving passengers should consult the departures board for the next available service, which is experiencing a delay of four years, three months and counting.

This is the runway to nowhere, a Palestinian airport teetering on the Egyptian edge of the Gaza Strip whose deserted control tower looks out over Egyptian border posts and Israeli pillboxes, and where the shattered runway last felt an aircraft’s tyres on February 13, 2001. But as Israel prepares to evacuate its tanks, soldiers, and 8,500 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, the fate of the airport — perhaps the greatest symbol of frustrated Palestinian aspirations for statehood and economic independence — remains in doubt. For even after its bold disengagement plan, the Government of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister, is sending out signals that it is reluctant to let Rafah airstrip reopen.

Regarded by Israel as a post-September 11 security threat — and, Palestinians mutter, as unwanted economic competition for Tel Aviv’s newly enlarged Ben Gurion airport at Tel Aviv — Sharon shut down the runway a few months after the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada in 2000 by bulldozing the tarmac, destroying the radar dish and firing rockets at Yassir Arafat’s presidential helicopter fleet. Since then the airport has languished somewhere between stasis and decay.

The departures and arrivals boards are frozen in black, devout employees use the luggage carousel area as a makeshift mosque and diesel technicians have rigged up a tennis court in the refuelling bay. With disengagement looming — Sharon plans to start evacuating the strip’s Jewish settlers by mid-August — many of the details of the operation, its aftermath and the Palestinians’ own plans for Gaza remain unclear to many on both sides.

For the past half decade, as the intifada raged, the strip’s 1.3 million Palestinians have been, in effect, locked inside a 25-mile (40km) stockade, relying on two heavily fortified Israeli crossings that control access to the outside world. They argue that the continued lack of an operating airport will impede their ability do business in regional and global markets, particularly in agriculture, when rapid export of vegetables is crucial if the post-disengagement economy is to grow. “The lack of a Palestinian-controlled airport has a negative impact on the Palestinian image as a business, investment and tourism destination,” says Nabila Assaf, the director of trade development for Paltrade in Ramallah. “The absence of incoming and outgoing air cargo directly to and from the occupied palestinian territories affects the cost, quality and delivery times for fresh produce and other time-sensitive products, and agricultural produce is one of Palestine’s main exports.”

But Israel has indicated that it is not well disposed to reopening the airport and relinquishing its tight control over Gaza’s borders. At a world economic forum in Jordan last month, Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s Deputy Prime Minister, implied that while Israel is “ready” for Egyptian forces to take full control of the Rafah land crossing between Gaza and Egypt soon after withdrawal, the airport is another matter. “How can you control the aeroplanes that will land in Gaza carrying, for instance, missiles?” he said, adding that the Palestinians would have to “stop terror” before Israel would let them resume flights. “They don’t need a range of 1,000km [620 miles]; 20km is inside the cities of southern Israel. That’s why we’re careful about this.”

This attitude stems from the blood spilt over half a decade, with 1,049 Israelis killed in some 135 suicide bombings and gun attacks since September 2000. Virtually all the bombers came from the West Bank, only a handful penetrating the razor-wire fence around the Gaza Strip. But Palestinians point to their own casualties — more than 3,600 killed — and say that Israel cannot expect peace until both sides enjoy equal chances at peaceful, prosperous statehood.

As the political standoff continues, 300 Palestinian Authority workers still arrive each day at the airport, opened in December 1998 at a cost of $86 million of foreign donors’ money.Muhammad Gharib, the airport’s deputy general manager, recalls the time when 15 flights a day left for Cairo, Doha, Amman, Dubai and Nicosia, as well as to Jeddah for the annual haj pilgrimage. “It is a political symbol. We are cut off from the outside world. It affects our culture, the expansion of our knowledge. We used to have a lot of foreigners visiting us from embassies and NGOs, now that is all gone.Our life as Palestinians is all based on hope,” he says. “If we didn’t have hope that the airport will one day work again, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Israel is expected to come under international pressure to let the Palestinians operate the airport and an as-yet-unbuilt seaport, farther up the coast. Indeed, Peter Mandelson, the EU Trade Commissioner, raised the airport issue in talks with senior Israeli officials in Jerusalem last month but emerged with a typically guarded reaction that Sharon’s people were “neither encouraging nor resistant” over it. “I think the Israeli position is much more relaxed on the seaport than airport. A seaport requires two years’ work, the airport a matter of months,” he said.

Shalom Harari, a retired Israeli army officer and senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, does “not rule out” the possibility of the airport reopening after Gaza is handed back to the Palestinians, “but there will be a demand for a strict guarantees and progress in the neutralisation of terror elements”.

However, Roni Shaked, a military expert writing for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth, says that while the closure suited Israel’s interests in 2001 because it had evidence of arms being smuggled in on aircraft, it would face intense foreign pressure to let the Palestinians run their own affairs in Gaza. “Israel’s actions to shut down the airport were part of a policy to destroy any Palestinian symbol for control and statehood,” he says. “Hitting this symbol of control would put pressure on the Palestinian Authority to fight terror and, specifically, hitting Arafat’s choppers would influence him to abandon the way of terror. It was a game of loss and gain.

“Israel will reopen the airport because of international pressure, and in light of the perception that it is in Israel’s interests to let the Palestinians release steam, wherever and whenever it is possible to do so.”