ISRAEL: Michael Jansen reports from the once-prosperous town of Qalqilya, in the West Bank, which the Israeli army has enclosed with a wall and a narrow gateway
We drove north from Jerusalem along a road devoid of traffic. There was just one lax checkpoint so it took only an hour to reach the blockade at the sole entance to the town of Qalqilya.
We parked the car among the lorries and cars crowding the checkpoint and walked up to two armed Israeli soldiers standing behind a couple of cement blocks. "We have an appointment with the mayor," Anne announced. One leafed through our passports and waved us through.
As Anne, Tareq and I walked to the other side, she remarked: "We were lucky. Sometimes it can take an hour or an hour an a half. Sometimes more. It depends on the mood of the soldiers on duty."
We engaged a driver and began the wall tour.
The ramshackle taxi plunged down an alley between orchards fenced with battered corrugated iron and halted at a vast expanse of bulldozed red earth. A Palestinian couple were loading their pickup from a massive pile of olive branches. Last week there had been rows of lovingly tended century-old olive trees here; today there is no sign of the shorn trunks and roots.
They have either been carted away by their owners or taken by the Israelis to the settlements to the east. On the hillock above us squatted a tank, its heavy gun pointing in our direction; on the slope below a bulldozer was flattening the land. "This has been done since we came here last week," Anne observed.
We went back through the once-prosperous market town, its shops shuttered and streets empty.
The smooth grey concrete wall looms over a handsome new school and a row of two-storey buildings.
The wall stands eight metres high and stretches as far as the eye can see to the right and left, a round watch tower every 200 metres.
When it is finished the wall will be flanked by a four-metre-wide trench, a barbed-wire fence and a military road patrolled by the Israeli army.
All Palestinian property located within 35 metres of the installation has been or will be levelled. The wall costs $1 million per kilometre and is 115 kms long so far.
Because it is set to loop deep into Palestinian territory to take in clusters of settlements, the wall is likely to be two or three times the West Bank's length of 350 kms.
The wall complex could cost billions of dollars. When it is finished Qalqilya, a town of 42,000 people, will be enclosed in a round concrete bottle with a long neck closed by a gate through which residents will come and go.
We met the Mayor, Maa'rouf Zahran, in his office. "Our lawyer went to the Israeli High Court in mid-August to get a ruling which would stop the work," he told us. "The court called a three-week halt until the case could be considered.
"But the contractors ignored it. 'We receive our orders from the Ministry of Defence," they said. The Israelis do not recognise the municipality since it is part of the Palestine Authority, so they inform the owners of the land they are expropriating by hanging documents in Hebrew and maps on trees and fences," he said.
"But the contractors do not follow the maps. They take much more land than \ on the plan. More than 6,000 dunums [1,500 acres] have been taken, 33 per cent of the land of Qalqilya town."
Nineteen wells and 50 reservoirs and nine villages with 18,000 residents in the Qalqilya area will be isolated on the western side of the wall. Mayor Zahran observed: "We feel that this type of wall forces people to emigrate to nearby villages or to Jordan."
Businessmen have already relocated some factories to the east. "Qalqilya was a wealthy town. We have 70 wells, 365 million cubic metres of water, half the water of the West Bank. We exported fruit and vegetables to the area, Israel and the Gulf. The monthly income of a family was $1,000, now it is $60. People survive on charity."
Hajj Hassan al-Hajj Hassan, a grey-bearded patriarch, lost 26 dunums [6.5 ACRES)]of olive and citrus trees to the wall. His brother also. "The land was in our family for many generations," he said. They each have six dunums [1.5 ACRES)]left. His large carpentry workshop does only 10 per cent of its former volume.
The wall is only part of the challenge the people of Qalqilya face. "My nephew was killed on July 26th while drinking coffee in the kitchen of his house. A man was killed yesterday when he was driving to work," the Hajj said. But in spite of the wall, the danger and the pressure to go, "We will never leave," he said.