"We cannot possibly be human to them. They cannot see us as people with feelings, with love. We are just numbers. Numbers to be reduced."

"The same crime has been committed every day by Israeli soldiers while their commanders, their government, and most of the world at large, looks the other way."

Sometime in the future there will be a day of reckoning for the Israelis. But that day is not yet here while the suffering of the Palestinians is, literally, more and more as each day dawns. These two articles help explain what is happening to the Palestinians, under boot of the Israelis. And the warning signs of what may be ahead, including a new expulsion, are there for all to see. Meanwhile, "Justice" Minister Yossi Beilin remains in office, neither resigning from the Barak government nor from the Labor Party as promised, and making the hypocrisy and duplicity of the Zionist left quite plain; also for all to see. One of Beilin's most recent acts was to block release of government documents from 1948, documents which would further prove that the Israelis planned the expulsion of the Palestinian population right from the beginning, and have been pursuing that policy for the entire time of Israel's existence regardless of which of the parties held power.

[The Independent - March 3, 2001] The walls of Jericho may have come tumbling down several millennia ago, as the Bible says, but the ancient town has never been better fortified.

Miles of freshly-dug mounds of rubble around its eastern edge stand as testimony to a new attempt not to prevent invaders storming in - as in Old Testament times - but to stop the residents getting out.

The piles of dirt mark the path of a new 7ft deep trench which snakes its way around much of Jericho, a patch of populated greenery which sits in the bone-dry valley north of the Dead Sea that separate the hills of Jerusalem from Jordan. It was gouged out under the cover of darkness by Israeli army bulldozers over the last few weeks, adding another depressing chapter to the 12,000-year-old history of the place that bills itself as the world's oldest city.

During the five months that have elapsed since the eruption of the Palestinian intifada, Israel has been refining the bleak art of what it calls the "closure" of Palestinian-run areas, but which much of the rest of the world - including the new US Secretary of State Colin Powell - now refers to as a siege.

Palestinians in the West Bank have resorted to travelling around the landscape on dirt tracks, bypassing the Israeli military roadblocks that imprison them in their towns and villages.

Journeys of only a few miles can now take hours; even then, they can fail. Palestinian human rights campaigners say that a few days ago a seriously ill woman died en route to hospital, because a quick enough path could not be found through the maze of the occupied territories.

But in Jericho, even back routes are now closed, severed by a World War One-style trench carving its way across the desert. Before they were used as a short cut by small-time truckers carrying figs and bananas to markets in the rest of the West Bank. But now they are not only sealed off, but dangerous. "You go down there at your own risk.," a young Palestinian military intelligence officer manning a road block on Jericho's eastern edge warned us as we drove out to inspect the trench, "There are Jewish settlers living down there who could easily shoot at you."

The trench is the latest symptom of the change that has engulfed Jericho since last September. It used to be one of the most relaxed places in the occupied territories, an oasis resort where before the intifada, even Jewish Israelis felt they could safely come to eat Arab food and buy souvenirs. There has been some violence during the uprising, but far less than in seething hotbeds of Hebron, Nablus or Gaza.

The town is now a different place. That much is clear from the moment you drive through the Israeli checkpoint that - with the aid of two tanks - guards the main road into town from Jerusalem. Missiles have blown huge holes in the side of the Jericho Dolphin, once the best seafood restaurant in the West Bank.

On a typical Friday afternoon six months ago, the car park by the sparkling Oasis casino nearby would have been packed with thousands of new four-wheel drives, owned by Israelis who swept in to taste the Middle East's touch of Vegas. The bullet-damaged casino, an Austrian-Palestinian joint venture that used to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is closed; not a soul is to be seen.

On the other side of town, the Swiss cable car that daily carried hundreds of tourists - again, including Israelis - up the Mount of Temptation, alleged scene of Christ's 40 days of suffering in the desert, is shut. "Jericho is completely dead," said Nadal Arafat (corr), 35, a maintenance engineer and one of the handful of staff who have yet to be struck off the cable car company's payroll because of the economic crisis. "It is very, very sad."

Quite why the Israeli army has decided to tighten its grip still further on Jericho is unclear. An Israel Defence Forces spokesman said yesterday the trench is to protect a major artery road running north-south through the Jordan Valley, where several motorists have been killed by Palestinian gunmen. But can a ditch - which at times is only a few yards from the road - deter gunmen?

The Palestinians of Jericho tend to chalk it up as yet another variation on the theme of collective punishment, illegally and unfairly imposed in a vain effort to force a once prosperous town into turning against the intifada. Most Israelis would dismiss the latter theory as grossly unreasonable. Perhaps a few would think differently, though, if they were to see their own army in action. As we drove back out of Jericho some Palestinian youths had begun to gather near the Israeli army's checkpoint. There were no more than 20 of them. The area is dead flat and clear for many hundreds of yards. There were no guns, no Molotov cocktails, no guerrillas to be seen. And yet two Israeli army jeeps had pulled up to do battle, blocking the road. A soldier aimed a gun at us and yelled at us to go back. As we turned, an Israeli soldier opened fire. At best, it was a rubber bullet - a lethal weapon which has killed scores in recent month - gratuitously fired towards a few stone-throwing youths.

The same crime has been committed every day by Israeli soldiers while their commanders, their government, and most of the world at large, looks the other way. Yet- take note - the intifada has not gone away.

[Al-Ahram Weekly, 1-7 March 2001] Mushir Al-Fara's family owns 76 dunums of land squeezed between the minuscule Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom in the centre of the Gaza Strip and the vast Gush Qatif settlement bloc that occupies its southwestern finger. On 21 November Israeli occupation army bulldozers swept away 12 dunums of their guava trees. The following week armoured pile drivers pulled down the family home, well and water pump. And in December the army arrived to raze the remaining land of woods, fences and gates.

"We think the Israeli army is clearing the land to lay a new settler road, linking Gush Qatif to Kfar Darom," says Al-Fara. He runs through his family's losses. "Apart from the land, there's the well, pump engines, irrigation systems, water tanks, the reservoir, fertilisers, furniture and family documents. At a conservative guess, I'd say we lost $200,000 in less than a month."

Still, he admits that he, his 79-year-old disabled mother, five brothers and six sisters are "lucky". The Al-Faras are a comparatively well-off family from Khan Yunis, the main town in southern Gaza. They have "alternative addresses" in Gaza City, Saudi Arabia and England. Others have no address at all.

Al-Fara is standing on scorched and cratered earth and torn, dead trees. This was the western edge of Qarrara, a small Palestinian village of 16,000. As the army ploughed through his land, it destroyed 20 homes in Qarrara, damaged another 40 and uprooted 5,000 of its olive and citrus trees. The army claims the "clearance" was necessary to defend the 242 settlers of Kfar Darom from armed Palestinian attacks. The Palestinians say it was an act of collective punishment or, worse, a way of extending the settlement's borders still further.

There are over 100 Palestinians now displaced in Qarrara, squatting in three tent encampments on or near what used to be their homes. Hayat Abu Azan is one of them. "No, there was no warning from the army," she says, recalling the night army bulldozers destroyed her house. "In fact, I was scared to death my 18-month-old daughter was under the rubble. She wasn't, thank God."

She has no hope for the future. "Once the Israelis extend their colonies, that's it," she says. "They never let you back." But she and the other displaced do return, every night and under army fire, if only to "assert their presence" on the land. Three Palestinians from Qarrara have been shot and wounded for making that assertion.

In Gaza any Palestinian presence is tantamount to resistance. The Tufah junction rests on the thin lip that separates Khan Yunis camp and its 54,000 Palestinian refugees from Neve Dekalim, a Jewish settlement of 2,000, the main block of which is carved in a star of David.

Over the last week ferocious gun battles have erupted there between Palestinian guerrillas and the Israeli army, leaving 30 camp shelters gutted and 77 Palestinians wounded, 40 from a particularly virulent strain of tear gas. Palestinian doctors say the army is using a new toxic agent in the gas that causes untreatable convulsions. The army says the gas is simply black smoke used to shield its positions.

But whatever the substance of the gas, trauma is in any case the common lot for those who live near Tufah. Ahmed Abu Namous shares his home with 21 other people, many of them second-time refugees from what were once homes but are now wrecked buildings raked by rocket and machine gun fire. He is convinced he knows what the army intends to do. "They're trying to push us back from the settlement. But we can't leave. Where would we go?"

Muna Al-Fara won't leave either. Mushir's older sister is a doctor who divides her time between her regular work in Gaza City and helping the homeless in Qarrara. From a ridge of towering date palms and dunes topped with wild grass, she points out a three-storey Palestinian house now commandeered by the Israeli army and a by-pass road occasionally used by speeding army jeeps and heavily armoured settler coaches. The rest is wasteland. This used to be her home.

"Don't ask me where anything was," she says. "I can no longer recognise the place. When the army destroyed the house, the bulldozers collected all the wreckage and dumped it somewhere. But I will fight the Israelis over this. I will get my land back and receive compensation. I will take it to the Israeli Supreme Court if I have to."

In the meantime, she draws sustenance on memory. She points to a small mound of rubble where, in 1969, her father divined a fresh water source on the land and dug the well. "He was a nationalist who believed greening the land was part of the struggle."

Another blasted grove is where she played with her brothers and sisters beneath giant Jomaz trees. "These are a rare species with thick trunks and creepers that fall down to the ground. The British brought them to Gaza from Kenya during the Mandate. Some were 70 years old. For me those trees were a little bit of paradise," she says. "The Israelis felled those, too."

She bites hard on her lip. "I wonder who the Israelis think we are. We cannot possibly be human to them. They cannot see us as people with feelings, with love. We are just numbers. Numbers to be reduced."