Palestinians say wall is a noose

The fertile black earth in which Mr. Shraim tends his cabbages goes right up to the barrier and he stands to lose crucial income once the zone is enforced. "If they apply the 100 meter zone, it is going to be disastrous," says Shraim.

All told, Qalqilya will lose some 15 percent of its municipal land and 50 percent of its agricultural land, according to LAW. The first phase of the wall, which encompasses Qalqilya, will affect 69 communities and some 213,000 people, the donor report says. Qalqilya's experience will be telling, as it is wealthier than other towns in the wall's path.

The wall has already had a profound impact, says the donor report. Agriculture has traditionally acted as an economic shock absorber during hard times, employing people when they lost jobs elsewhere. But wall construction has cut people off from that shock absorber. An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people have already left Qalqilya in order to escape the stricter Israeli hold on their lives and pocketbooks. The wall comes on top of an isolation initiated by Israeli closures and curfews.

"Qalqilya depends on agriculture, the manpower of its people, and the commercial sector. These three sectors have been hit hard by the [Israeli] siege, and the city has been isolated from the surrounding villages," Governor Malki says. "Now when you bear in mind that villagers from nearby villages can't come to Qalqilya anymore, up to 85 percent of the economy has come to a halt."

Throughout the Palestinian territories, this isolation has also broken down social networks, along with social services. West Bank stillbirths are up 58 percent over the past 29 months as medical care is harder to reach. Over 500 schools have closed across the territory because students and teachers can't reach them.

Some critics of the wall argue that short of a solution to this conflict, good intelligence, not a wall, is the only thing that will stop terror. They say that the despair engendered by the barrier, like the closures and curfews before it, will inevitably create more suicide bombers.

And even though Israel says that suicide bombers lead to the creation of the wall that is strangling Qalqilya, in at least one home here there is no regret about Palestinian violence against Israel.

"What my brother did wasn't wrong - but it wasn't enough," says Yousef Amer, whose brother Fadi blew himself up at an Israeli gas station in March 2001. The explosion killed two Jewish seminary students, ages 14 and 16.

Mr. Amer's comment prompts nervous laughter from two local officials who quickly point out that they disagree and that many Palestinians have divergent opinions about the most violent parts of the intifada.

Now, as Qalqilya struggles in the aftermath of that bombing and others like it, Malki insists that Qalqilya's residents are standing firm. Convinced that the wall is really meant to drive Palestinians from their land, he says they will refuse to leave under Israeli pressure. "We have all decided that we are going to stay here, even if we have to starve and eat grass," he says.

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