Hamas inadvertently plays cupid

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GAZA CITY -- When Gaza's border with Egypt came crashing down last week, tens of thousands of Palestinians rushed through, looking to buy food, fuel and other basic goods. Emran Labbad was among them, but he was searching for something even more precious: a lost love.Amid the frantic crowds who surged through the Rafah crossing in the first hours after it was suddenly open, he found the betrothed he had feared he would never see again. Emran, a 33-year-old Gazan, tall, thin and neatly groomed, saw the fair face of 25-year-old Heba, the Cairo-born Palestinian refugee he had promised to marry two years before.Joy surged in his heart, but in deeply conservative Gaza, Emran knew he couldn't race forward to embrace her, as he wanted. Against his basic desire to grab her and hold on just in case fate was about to take her away again, he held his composure and greeted her formally, as custom demanded."I only said 'welcome.' I couldn't do anything else. I couldn't kiss her, because it is forbidden," he said with a belly laugh and the smile of someone who knows that, finally, everything is going to work out just fine.Until last week, it was far from certain that the tale of Emran and Heba was going to have a happy ending.The two met in 1996, when Emran was in Cairo to visit his relatives and Heba was barely a teenager -- too young, Emran says, for him to pay much attention to her. But when Emran, a television cameraman by profession, returned 10 years later on a training course, he saw her again and fell deeply in love."Something had changed," Emran says, recalling the second meeting with Heba, who is a distant relative and shares the same last name. "I don't know what to say, it's a different feeling, something I cannot really describe." That day, Emran spoke to Heba's father and asked if he could marry her and bring her to Gaza. Her father was skeptical, but the border between Gaza and Egypt was sporadically open at the time, so he eventually consented.Then, as so often happens in Gaza, matters took a sudden turn for the worse. In June of 2006, a group of militants affiliated with Hamas infiltrated Israel and kidnapped a young Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit, who is still missing to this day. Israel retaliated with a large-scale offensive against Gaza, and Egypt closed the Rafah crossing point.Though the couple said they never gave up the hope that they would eventually be together, Emran's friends were urging him to accept the reality that he and Heba were not meant to be, and to choose another wife. He dismissed the suggestion. He didn't think he'd find that "different feeling" with another woman.As their desperation grew, Emran cracked what he said was a joke -- that Heba could enter Gaza through the dark and dangerous smugglers' tunnels that run deep underground, providing the only link between Gaza and the outside world as Israel's blockade tightened. To his surprise, Heba said she was willing to try."I agreed because I couldn't see any other solution," she said of what would have been an underground crawl on her elbows and knees, a journey that likely would have taken a terrifying half hour. "I thought many times about this choice, and agreed despite all the danger."Heba arrived with her mother on the Egyptian side of Rafah on Jan. 22, and arrangements were made with smugglers for them to crawl through the tunnels the next day. Emran says he spent the night praying for an intervention of some sort.Shortly after dawn on Jan. 23, he got the news he had been waiting for. His employer, the Ihlas News Agency, called and asked him to rush to Rafah. The border wall, they told him, had been destroyed and people were traveling unfettered between Gaza and Egypt.The unlikeliest of characters -- men from the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas -- had inadvertently played Cupid by knocking down the rusty iron wall that had separated Emran and Heba for so long.Dressed in a beige blouse and a matching headscarf that she had specially selected for the day, Heba tentatively negotiated her way across the ridges of the fallen wall and finally set foot in the Gaza Strip. At long last, she laid eyes on her fiance, who had left his camera team behind and was waiting for her."I was so happy and excited -- everything was changing suddenly," Heba recalls.Now, at long last, there's a wedding to plan, set for Feb. 15, the day after Valentine's Day.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)