A year ago this week — on March 16, 2003 — Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a two-story-high, armor-clad bulldozer in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah.

Rachel, 23, had taken a break from her senior year at Evergreen State College in Washington state to volunteer for a year as a nonviolent peace activist in the International Solidarity Movement.

She died on a mound of rubble, trying to protect the home of a physician whose house was about to be razed.

According to the United Nations, the Israeli government has destroyed more than 7,500 homes in Rafah to create a buffer zone with the Egyptian border and to build an iron wall, the prototype for the larger wall now being erected in the occupied West Bank.

On Monday, two 18-year-old bombers from Gaza slipped through the wall, killing themselves and 11 Israelis in the nearby seaport of Ashdod. Militant Palestinian groups had threatened retaliation after Israeli forces killed 14 people, including four children, in a raid the week before. Hours after the Ashdod bombing, Israeli helicopters fired rockets at three workshops in Gaza City.

So the cycle of violence continues. B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, reported that 3,460 people, about three-quarters of them Palestinians, have been killed since Sept. 29, 2000. But that number is no good — I am sure it's more today.

Only 135 square miles — one-tenth the size of Bexar County — Gaza is home to about 1.3 million people, making it the most densely populated place on Earth. Less than five miles wide and 28 miles long, it shares a 6.8-mile border with Egypt and a 32-mile border with Israel. The Mediterranean laps its western shore.

Gaza is achingly poor, as I saw when I visited in December. Three-quarters of the people live below the poverty level, $2.10 a day per person.

Doctors report growing instances of malnutrition among the children — 61 percent are anemic. Some 97.5 percent of the kids suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and with reason: Two-thirds have witnessed the shooting of a relative, one-third have been tear gassed.

Meanwhile, 7,500 Israelis live in 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip. These enclaves, the military camps surrounding them, checkpoints, bypass roads, Israeli-controlled buffer zones and areas where Palestinians live under Israeli control eat up 42 percent of the land.

Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made a surprise announcement that Israel planned a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The settlers will be relocated. The army will pull out. Egypt will patrol its own border.

He explained that it's become too costly — a "strategic burden" — to maintain an Israeli presence in Gaza.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat is warming up to the idea. The United States will bless the plan if the Palestinian Authority is included in the transition planning. Egypt is saying yes to border security, no to patrolling inside Gaza.

My correspondents in Palestine are skeptical. The cynical theorize that removing all of the Israelis from Gaza would free Sharon to bomb it or seal it off and starve it.

Another talked-about scenario is that Sharon hopes to split the Palestinians into two opposing camps, a free-but-isolated Gaza (possibly ruled by Hamas militants) and a still-occupied, ironically more moderate West Bank, with conflicting agendas. Divide and conquer.

Others, noting Sharon proposes shifting the Gaza settlers to the occupied West Bank, suggest he might try to present this as the final status agreement, a way of avoiding the negotiating table. He's trying to trade Gaza for the more desirable West Bank, they warn.

Yet others say the proposal is merely a distraction to take Israeli eyes off corruption charges that were levied against Sharon about the same time this disengagement plan was proposed.

It bears watching. The world can't afford to be eyeless in Gaza.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.