- BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters)
- "We are being sealed off," Abu Salem said, watching his backyard
vanish under a new Israeli wall that is to cut into the town where Jesus
was born to safeguard Jews coming to pray at a biblical tomb.
-
- Israeli army crews laid the first 100 metres this week
of a towering barrier that will scoop part of Bethlehem into an enlarged
security zone being carved out of occupied West Bank territory fringing
Jerusalem.
-
- The barrier is the latest spur in a swathe of fences
and walls Israel says is meant to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers.
Palestinians see a strategem to annex land they want for a viable state
under a stalled U.S.-backed peace plan.
-
- In the Bethlehem area, the cement rampart will separate
thousands of Palestinians from farmland as it twists and turns to take
in Jewish settlements -- a recurrent pattern elsewhere in the West Bank
now under World Court scrutiny.
-
- By looping into north Bethlehem to create a corridor
from Jerusalem to Rachel's Tomb, the barrier will also isolate nearby Palestinian
residents, mainly Christians, from the town centre with its Church of the
Nativity, revered as Jesus's birthplace.
-
- Israeli blockades imposed to stifle Palestinian violence
earlier in an uprising launched in 2000 put out of business most of the
tomb district's merchants who had thrived from tourist pilgrims.
-
- The eight-metre high wall may well finish off the rest
and turn the district into a ghetto, local inhabitants say.
-
- "We are being severed from our natural landscape.
They seized part of my land to build this ugly wall. We cannot see Jerusalem
any more. We cannot build any more. We cannot sell. We cannot move. We
are frozen," said Abu Salem, 63, a grocer.
-
- From a leftover patch of his yard, he gazed glumly at
workmen lowering wall slabs with a crane into place along a razed tract
where some of his olive and fig trees had stood.
-
- 18,000 TO BE IN ENCLAVES, MUNICIPALITY SAYS
-
- The original army map handed out to residents a year
ago delineating land to be requisitioned for the wall would have trapped
500 Palestinians in a north enclave of Bethlehem, whose municipality totals
140,000 people including outlying villages.
-
- A revised map of the wall route issued last July, after
the municipality filed suit in Israel's High Court, shaved the enclave
to some 80 residents. But left intact were extensions that would encircle
18,000 villagers, the municipality says.
-
- "When the wall closes in, the little trade I have
left will die off," said Jihad Bandak, 27. His shop would fall into
the barrier enclave, 200 metres from Rachel's Tomb.
-
- As he spoke, an armour-plated Jerusalem bus rattled past
and pulled up at the bunker-like shrine, disgorging devout Jews as Israeli
soldiers stood by. The buses shuttle to and fro all day, passing rows of
boarded-up souvenir shops and restaurants.
-
- Palestinians living within barrier pockets will need
special Israeli permits to remain, as will others to visit. Gates will
be installed. But they have been opened only at brief, irregular intervals
at the whim of soldiers elsewhere along the barrier.
-
- "Precedent is poor. It'll be a prison here,"
said Bandak.
-
- Palestinians say Israel's security squeeze is disproportionate
to any threat to Rachel's Tomb, which Jews regard as the final resting
place of the biblical matriarch.
-
- Israel dismisses Palestinian assurances the shrine would
be safe under their control. Gunmen and stone-throwers, often Muslims from
the nearby Aida refugee camp, targeted visiting worshippers regularly before
an army clampdown.
-
- Bethlehem's Applied Research Institute says thousands
of acres (hectares) of local farmland will end up behind the wall. Institute
chief Jad Issac said the barrier would strangle the local economy and leave
no space for a growing population.
-
- Two suicide bombers from Bethlehem have hit Jerusalem
in the past six weeks, killing 19 people. Israel says Bethlehem remains
a haven for militants. Requisition notices said land was seized "under
steps to prevent terrorist attacks", not set new borders.
-
- Palestinians point to expanding settlements and bypass
roads around Bethlehem due to be shielded by the barrier and which Israel
vows never to yield under any peace deal.
|
