Until a few months ago, the Shreim family could see the plains of central Israel from their living room.
”Now all that we can see is this wall,” laments Nabil Abdelfattah Shreim, pointing at the huge concrete structure which looms just 20 metres in front of their home.
The eight-metre high wall has been built by the Israeli army to separate the 40 000 inhabitants of this West Bank town from Israeli territory.
Located in the north of the West Bank, Qalqiliya is bang on the Green Line, the boundary which separates the Jewish state from the Palestinian territories.
Before the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in September 2000, Israelis poured into Qalqiliya every Saturday, boosting the economy of the town’s residents.
But the dozens of suicide bombers who have crossed the frontier to carry out their attacks on Israeli targets have persuaded Ariel Sharon’s government to build a security fence along the length of the West Bank in a bid to stop infiltrations.
The barrier normally takes the form of a two-tiered wire fence which runs on either side of a road and a ditch. But at Qalqiliya, it transforms itself for several kilometres into a grey concrete wall dotted at regular intervals by turrets which allow Israeli soldiers to keep a permanent eye on the town.
A defence ministry spokesperson said that the first section of the security fence, which will run for around 130 kilometres across the northwest of the West Bank, should be completed by the end of the month.
The Shreims, who moved into their home two years ago, are the epitome of the Palestinian middle classes who prospered in the wake of the 1993 Oslo peace accords that raised hopes of a brighter future.
Nabil, a 41-year-old car parts salesman, said that he had spent $320 000 on buying and doing up his luxurious home which boasts a miniature waterfall in the garden.
But one has to climb up on to the roof of the house to see over the wall to the first houses on Israeli territory.
The Shreim family and their neighbours are not the only ones to suffer as a result of the wall.
The route chosen by the Israeli authorities for the fence means that Qalqiliya finds itself encircled and nearly totally cut off from the rest of the West Bank. Its only link to the outside is a single Israeli army roadblock in the east of the town.
”We feel like we are in a prison,” said the town’s mayor, Maarouf Zahran.
Zahran, who is a member of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, said that 18 factories had already either closed for good or relocated to elsewhere in the West Bank as a result of the wall.
The mayor said that he could, at a stretch, understand why the Israelis wanted to build a fence to the west of Qalqiliya but only on condition that the construction conformed exactly to the countours of the Green Line and did not creep into Palestinian land.
”We don’t have any border with Israel to the north, to the south, and to the east … They have no right to build a wall,” added the mayor.
He said that the line of the fence all around Qalqiliya was designed to protect more than 20 Jewish settlments in the West Bank, home to more than 50 000 people.
The building of the wall has resulted in the destruction or complete isolation of 40%of the town’s farmland as well as depriving the Palestinians of 17 natural water sources, he claimed.
”And what good is a state if we cannot control our water or our land?” said Zahran.
The wall means that Nabil’s wife Nuheila can no longer enjoy the view of the sunset through the trees which now lie on the Israeli side.
But despite all their problems, the Shreim family say they have no intention of leaving.
”It is our house. Where are we meant to go?” said Nabil Shreim. – Sapa-AFP