By April, the project had collapsed, money ran out and  Jabir quit. A miasma of rotten fruit and vegetables had become the stench of defeat and decay spreading through Gaza, as the hopes of an economic renaissance evaporated. In 2007, Hamas violently ousted Fatah from Gaza.

The former Israeli settlers shook their heads and said, “I told you so.”

Together with his wife and children, Dror Vanunu, 39, was ousted from Gaza in August 2005. They were forced to spend five months living out of suitcases in a hotel, and were moved around the country before eventually settling in Nitzan, a small village where many former settlers of Gush Katif — the biggest cluster of settlements in Gaza — came to live, just an hour’s drive from their erstwhile homes. “My children went to 11 different elementary schools,” he says.

He sits just a few metres away from the Gush Katif Memorial Centre, where visitors are guided through a sentimental audio-visual presentation of the Gaza withdrawal as seen through the eyes of the strip’s Jewish former residents.

Melancholic piano and clarinet music pipes through the speakers as visitors sit on symbolically-hacked palm tree stubs and watch videos of soldiers in tears trying to evacuate settlers while bulldozers destroy one pastel-hued villa after another. Ten years on, many of the ex-Gazan residents still live in makeshift “cara-villas” — temporary homes akin to caravans, searingly hot in the summer, freezing cold in the winter. They are waiting to buy land which would relocate them next to their former neighbours. They are bitter about having to leave their homes in Gaza — and their bitterness is compounded by the rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled strip which keep them running to improvised air-raid shelters in the shape of giant sewage pipes, open at both ends and with a single bench in the middle.

Looking out towards Gaza, Vanunu talks angrily of the Palestinians who now reside where he used to live. “We left behind infrastructure worth billions of dollars,” he says. “The fact is that the Palestinians had the chance to do something positive — but the opposite happened. When we left Gush Katif [the Israeli settlement community in Gaza], instead of encouraging the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, they came directly into our communities, they vandalised our synagogues, they burned them. They took the agricultural tools that we left there and they turned them into tools of terror. The metal of the greenhouses of Gush Katif was used for the Qassam [rocket] industry. And many  of the Qassam rockets that were fired into southern Israel were fired from the ruins of our homes.”

In the year of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, 488 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel — the fewest in a year since such attacks began in 2001. But the following year, the number more than doubled to 1,123 rockets fired. In 2007, 2,427 rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza. Three wars between Israel and Gaza-based Hamas have followed, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people. “We knew exactly that it would be a terrible mistake,” says Vanunu.