There will likely be plenty more heavenly credit in the coming months. Last week Jaffarey finished digging plots for two more victims: a 54-year old housewife and a member of Yasir Arafat’s elite presidential guard. Both had died in a missile attack on Palestinian Authority installations by Israeli helicopter gunships in retaliation for a string of suicide bombings. The strikes, which devastated living quarters, offices, arsenals and a storage depot used by Arafat’s bodyguards, were meant as a clear message to the Palestinian leader from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: curb the violence or risk further destruction. But Islamic militants vowed revenge, and Israeli reaction to the military operation was more skepticism than solidarity. Yossi Sarid, chairman of Israel’s left wing Meretz Party, called the assault “a pathetic repeat of what Ehud Barak did [that] has no effect against terror.” Meanwhile at the Al Bira Cemetery, Jaffarey was preparing for more bloodshed. “After all these deaths there can be no peace,” he said, shoveling earth over a plain coffin draped in Hamas flags.

For now, Israel is placing its bets on confrontation. Its principal target: Force 17, a 3,500-man security outfit built by Arafat and his henchmen in Lebanon in the 1970s and now responsible both for guarding the Palestinian leader and preserving internal stability. Israel intelligence sources claim that the force has carried out several hits against Israeli targets in the West Bank–including the murder of two security guards in east Jerusalem last October and the sniper killing near Nablus of Binyamin Kahane, son of the late militant rabbi Meir Kahane. Israeli officials also told NEWSWEEK that Force 17 has operated in tandem with Hamas demolitions experts to set up roadside bombs around Jerusalem and Ramallah. The key player: Mahmoud Damarah, Arafat’s longtime bodyguard, who runs Force 17 in Ramallah and also allegedly commands a hit squad. “He’s as close to Arafat as the shirt on his back,” says an intelligence source. Arafat doesn’t give direct orders for individual murders, the source says, but offers his tacit approval: “Normally it’s a nod and a wink. It’s a sense that ’this is what the old man expects’.” In Ramallah, a Force 17 commander who goes by the nom de guerre Nasir denied his group had any links to terrorists. “They say we’re with Hamas, but it’s a lie,” he said, relaxing in his barracks just down the road from the cemetery.

The Israelis are also said to be gunning for a more insidious enemy: Hamas. Largely dormant during the first few months of this Intifada, the Islamic militants have claimed responsiblity for a recent string of suicide bombings, including last week’s explosion at a bus stop near Netanya that killed two teenage yeshiva students. A Hamas spokesman said last week that seven more “martyrs” are now preparing to blow themselves up inside Israel. In Gaza last week, Hamas leaders were beefing up their personal-security squads and staying underground in preparation for Israeli counterstrikes. But in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s ailing spiritual leader, vowed that the suicide bombs would continue as long as Israel kept even an inch of historic Palestine. “We have a right to fight Israel in the same manner that Israel fights us,” he said.

Yassin has received encouragement from Arafat. Early in the Intifada, the Palestinian leader freed more than 100 Hamas militants from jails in Gaza and the West Bank. Arafat visited Yassin in a Gaza hospital last month and regularly speaks with him by phone. “I respect Arafat because he has a long history as a fighter,” Yassin told NEWSWEEK in a barely audible whisper, as he lay in his bed, surrounded by solicitous aides. Arafat could still make trouble for Hamas–locking up the militants again, cutting the flow of funds from wealthy Islamic groups or closing Hamas institutions. But Yassin implied that such measures would do little to deter Hamas from its mission: destroying Israel.

Hasaf Jaffarey knows what all this means. Under a fierce sun, the gravedigger continues his tour of the cemetery, pointing out the grave of a 3-year-old who died in his mother’s arms, two friends who were blown into pieces by a tank shell in February. “All they could find were their hands and legs–no bodies.” He gestures toward an earthen plot without a tombstone, only piles of rocks and a faded wreath. “Her name was Aida,” he says. “She went to pick up her daughter from school and got caught in the crossfire. The family is poor, but the Palestinian Authority says it will buy the tombstone for them.” A few paces away, he stops before an empty grave. “When there’s a war like this, we dig them ahead of time.” The wait to fill them, he adds, is never very long.