Older Gazans, several fighting back tears, said they could not remember anything like this: a group of world-famous musicians coming to give a concert here. Just getting by is a daily struggle for Gazans. Culture of this sort, which people elsewhere take for granted, has long been unthinkable. For a generation or two of younger Gazans, the mere sight of Mr. Barenboim marked a first: He was the first Israeli many of them had ever encountered who was not toting a rifle or riding in an Apache helicopter.

“Our job is to bring things in and out of Gaza, but we have never brought music,” said Filippo Grandi, the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Welfare Agency, when he greeted the players and Mr. Barenboim at Rafah. Eight young children from a local music academy, stiffly concentrated before their instruments, had assembled in the waiting lounge there to play traditional Palestinian music as a welcome.

“You are giving us all a big gift,” Mr. Grandi said, “and the people of Gaza don’t receive many gifts these days.”

Representatives from Mr. Grandi’s agency and also from the Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process worked with local nongovernmental organizations on the concert’s logistics. They invited women’s groups, businessmen and music students. The event was announced only a day or two beforehand, for security reasons and because, like anything else that involves getting into or out of Gaza, it was touch and go to the end. Mr. Barenboim’s foundation paid for the cost of jetting the musicians to Gaza.

A threat from an Islamic extremist group in Gaza, received by United Nations officials during the middle of the Mozart symphony, forced a hasty exit by the players after some post-concert speeches. Crestfallen children waited in vain for autographs. The sight of players hurrying past them was heartbreaking. The orchestra swept back to Rafah and reboarded its plane for Berlin on Tuesday, with a stopover in Vienna: 40 hours of travel, as it turned out, for not quite an hour of music.

But no one complained.

“This represents a new beginning, a brighter future, for Gazans to be accepted by the international community,” is how Faysal Shawa, a 43-year-old Gazan businessman, saw the concert. “It means people still believe in us. You start with music, and end up with acceptance.”