Monitoring Camps in Jenin and Tulkarem, Northern West Bank

75% of the UNRWA Emergency Job Creation Programme is implemented in the North West Bank and therefore I have 5 monitors in that area. I went up there a few times these past 2 weeks to work with them on the new system I have put in place and to train them while they are actually on the job monitoring the beneficiaries.

This is the Health Centre of Fara Camp in Nablus. A month ago, a new agreement was made between the Palestinian Police and the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), which is to allow the Palestinian Police to work during the day in the Nablus municipality and surrounding camps and during the night, the IDF would take over. This means for the refugees of Fara camp, incursions nearly every night.

This health centre was built with a donation from the Italian Government in 1993. At that post-Oslo period, many governments were making generous donations to rebuild Palestine....We wonder now how much these contributions actually made a difference.

In between, two monitoring destinations, we went to the local coffee shop to get some coffee for a few colleagues in Jerusalem who had asked us, knowing we were going to Nablus. They import coffee from Costa Rica and grind it with cardommon pods, to make the typical Arab coffee.

For lunch, we went to this great meat place which has been there for 40 years. This guy grills the meat directly above the coal. It was absolutely delicious... Vegetarians do not know what they are missing!

On the way out of Nablus, we passed by a Tahina factory (Tahina is a beige sauce made of sesame seed eaten on salads or shwarma all over the Middle East). If Tahina is mixed with sugar, you get Halawa, eaten on bread as a dessert.

The sesame seeds are imported from Eritrea.

The machine that processes the sesame seeds

Following the monitor in his car.....View of the settlements in the West Bank

This is a typical settlement on a hill around Nablus. The caravans in front of the settlement are an example of illegal settlement expansion. Indeed, the Israeli government has made it illegal to build more settlements, so many expand with the use of caravans, which bit by bit, become permanent houses, and without a word, the settlement has doubled its size and population.

Driving to Jenin Camp, we drove through the agricultural area surrounding Jenin in the Northern most part of the West Bank

This is the main check point to enter Jenin Refugee Camp. The soldier does not come down from the tower, he signals to show your ID and then checks it with his goggles. If he is satisfied, he presses a button which opens the large electrified yellow metal fence. It is in Jenin that security is the tightest as many suicide bombers and militants are said to come from Jenin.

Inside Jenin Camp, we went around the UNRWA installations such as schools and health centre to monitor our beneficiaries who work in these installations in exchange of cash, i.e. unskilled cash for work.

Posters with photos of martyrs from the camp. This particular one (left), bombed our offices in Jenin Camp because he was not able to work under the programme and benefit from the cash.... He was martyred a few month later (unrelated to his actions against UNRWA).

Paintaings of Arafat and paradise-like landscapes... A way to forget the terrible every-day life of the refugee camp and IDF incursions.

On the way back to Nablus, we passed by an UNRWA resource centre for children. This is some their art. Below you see the map of what they call "Historic Palestine" which include current Israel and West Bank and Gaza as one full territory as it was before 1948. In the crying eye, positioned where Jerusalem is located, you can see the Al Aqsa mosque.




















Here is another drawing from the resource centre, which shows current Palestine, West Bank and Gaza.






















This last photo was taken while I was on another visit to the North. This time in Tulkarem
near Jenin. I worked with our monitor who is responsible for that area. We visited one of the two camps there, NurShams Camp, which means the Camp of the sun's light. It has a population of 9000. Inside the office of the Camp Service Officer, there was a board above him and something strook me. This board is a sort of information gathering board which I am sure was put up in 1948 when the camp was created. At the time the camps were made of tents and huts as those you see now in Darfur or other parts of the World. This board still has written, tents and huts on the top part. What this episode told me, whas that even today, 50 years later, the refugees continue to believe at the temporary nature of their current habitations and that one day, they will have the "right to return".... None of this of course was discussed at Annapolis..... What will be of the 4 million Palestinian refugees dispersed in the region once we have (if we one day indeed do have) a 2-state solution? Their houses which they once occupied in now Israeli territory are long destroyed and rebuilt....