News stories by Jerrold Kessel, page 4

Backed by armed security men, the municipal inspectors race their jeeps through the narrow alleyways and up a hillside crowded with buildings.

Scores of Palestinian women and their children carefully sift through the desert sands. They are looking for hard nuggets.

When Benjamin Netanyahu dug a spade here and in another West Bank settlement this week, some thought the Israeli Prime Minister was actually digging a hole into current United States-sponsored peace efforts.

A week after the devastating Haiti earthquake, Israelis watched proudly as their TV channels showed the New York Fire Department rushing two young boys, extricated from the rubble of a building, to a field hospital set up by the Israeli army in Port-au-Prince.

One year after the devastating attack on Hamas in Gaza a new wave of reports castigating Israel for war crimes has emerged.

Just beyond the main Israeli checkpoint, ten kilometres short of Jerusalem, a white Nissan station wagon is abruptly edging to the side of the road. It comes to a halt on the shoulder.

In the absence of any progress towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians, leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) are adopting a reasonable approach as a way of building up international pressure on Israel to get it back to the negotiating table.

Resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along the two-state parameters seems less with Israel torn between accepting a Palestinian state and the settler ideology which calls for Israel’s exclusive rule over the whole of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

One year after the devastating attack on Hamas in Gaza a new wave of reports castigating Israel for war crimes has emerged.

The sun is about to set over Jabel Mukaber. The call of the muezzin envelops the valley beneath Naim Aweisat’s balcony and, rolling from the mosques of Abu Dis across the wall in the West Bank, rebounds from the stark concrete Israeli security wall to answer the minarets that peer over the walled Old City.