Today we went to the Industrial Zone at the edge of Tulkarm. On one side of it is the 'Security Wall' - but there is another wall built all around the Zone, cutting it off, geographically, from the rest of Tulkarm. There are 12 factories inside the Zone - each one owned by a retired senior Israeli army officer. Inside the Zone neither Israeli nor Palestinian law holds: the workers are not covered by any insurance, health and safety, or labour regulation acts.

But what struck us as we stood outside was the smell. Our lips tingled, the taste in our mouth was sickening and metalic, the smell noxious.

We then moved to the local dump. The factories dump all sorts of waste here and the site burns continuously. It is hard to describe the sight and the smell. The smoke blew down the hill onto the near-by Palestinian village - the scene was apocalyptic.

We took some photos and left as soon as we could. When we were far enough away we stopped the taxi and washed our mouth out with water - both of us feeling quite ill.

To think Palestinian villagers have to put up with this day after day is appalling.

Last night we had dinner with Yazen - the brother of our friend, guide, translator, facilitator and driver Mohamed!

Yazen is a father of 7 - 5 boys and 2 girls. They range in ages from 19 down to 5. His house is situated on the edge of the refugee camp and is busy with the constant tooing and frowing of friends, family and neighbours. Yazen teaches science at the local UNWRA school and so, like his children, is now on the long summer holidays that will not see him return to work until the 1 September.

It sounds fantastic - 3 months holiday! But as we talked it became clear that the holidays brought their own problems. Teachers are not paid very well in Palestine, so there is no chance that the family will get away for a few days - instead there will be long days spent in the house.

Away days are not really an option. The beach is 13 km away, but they are not allowed there. Day trips to other towns mean hours on the road, negotiating the various check-points. In any case, because of the occupation, all 'entertainments' have been closed down - so a trip to Nablus or Jenin, for example, unless it involves a visit to family or friends, means little change from the routine in Tulkram.

Even a family picnic is not possible - there is no-where available that would be safe or sensible to go to.

As Yazen discussed this with us we became aware of the crushing, routine boredom imposed on people in the West Bank. Life is reduced to a daily struggle for survival, interaction with family and friends and manouevering around the occupation as best possible.

Last night we were with Ibrahim. He was part of a group of 15 Palestinians who had been severely wounded who were invited to meet with a similar group of Israeli wounded in a reconciliation event held in Bosnia this May. All the Palestinian wounded had been shot during Israeli incursions and like Ibrahim were in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he was shot in the stomach and arm he had been sitting outside his coffee shop when the army swooped in, shooting  randomly. The Israeli's on the other hand were all soldiers and were mainly officers, the most senior being a colonel. They had all been wounded in wars, in Lebanon mainly. One was a pilot who had been shot down over Syria and one was paralysed and in a wheelchair due to a car accident. There was absolutely no comparison between the two groups; the Palestinians being innocent victims the others being soldiers injured whilst trying to kill others and on no account could be considered as innocent victims.

Their discussions were often bizarre. The Israelis asked why they were not welcomed on the West Bank!!! They accused the Palestinian delegation of being a co-ordinated group who had rehersed their stories even though they had never met each other before this initiative. The only positive thing to emerge was that the Israelis began to fall out amongst themselves. But the question remains as to what this NGO co-ordinated event was doing and hoping to achieve.

This was the question put to Noor by the Israeli officer who questioned him. He had been 'pulled' and put in the jurra at the Enab checkpoint. He comes from a large family some of whom are in prison, others who are politically active. It was, he thought, on account of his family name that he was stopped for questioning. 

He was on his way home to Tulkarm from the University in Nablus where he has just completed the first year of his law degree. He was questioned after a two hour wait. His answer was that sometimes he feels strong and sometimes not. The officer promised him that he could make him strong all the time - give him a car, a house in Israel and even a wife! In return he would have to work for them as an informer especially with respect to his family in Tulkarm and supply information about students at the University. Of course Noor flatly rejected this offer and told him he was being ridiculous to expect such a thing from him.

He was then released and told he could go, but not before the officer told him that he managed many informers at the University and that they would be keeping an eye on him. As far as Noor was concerned this was an empty threat. The students all know that there are collaborators amongst them and they take care.

As it happens, Noor has not enjoyed his law course and is going to transfer to Finance and Accounting. He can study this subject in Tulkarm so in September he will no longer have to make the long, uncertain daily journey to Nablus.

Football is one of the most popular sports on the West Bank. In the refugee camps and on bits of waste ground you often seen young boys kicking a ball around. Several t.v. channels cover football - we have watched the European Championships most nights whilst we have been here, but there are also several alternatives from the Middle Eastern leagues and Asian World Cup Qualifiers.

Earlier today we met Mohamed Iraqi who is a librarian in Tulkram, a sports journalist for the local press and a coach for Tulkarm under 15 football team.

Mohamed told us that, like everything else here, football has been disrupted by the occupation. Before the year 2000, for example, Tulkarm used to play in front of crowds of 3,000-5,000. The league was competitive and the standard okay. Palestinian players had been picked from the league and made some progress in other Middle Eastern leagues and even in Europe.

But then came the occupation.

Nablus used to have a good team - but not anymore. They find it hard to train, their pitch has been destroyed, the social spaces to play football have been closed down and many of the youngsters who would normally take up the games have been arrested.

Tulkarm are now sitting top of the league. We asked Mohamed when the league would finish and got an astonishing answer: it doesn't! It is often impossible to travel to matches, the Israelis stop supporters and team members at check-points when they travel; pitches are destroyed; and games cannot be planned ahead because it will never be known when towns, cities and roads will be cut off. Teams play who they can, when they can.

This has also affected the Palestinian National Team. The players from Gaza cannot travel to meet up with their team mates in the West Bank: so international training sessions take place in Jordan or Egypt!

The story we told this morning by the Public Health team about Tulkarm's own waste dump was revealing. The municipality is concerned about the hazard posed by their own dump. As the town has expanded there are now dwellings as near as 50m to the site. The municipality want to move it but their options are restricted due to the limited land they have in Area A. But the issue has been further complicated by the decision of the Israeli army to locate a checkpoint near the entrance to the tip. It was seen as a further deliberate attempt to disrupt daily life as their random opening and closing of the checkpoint disrupted waste disposal.

But it has also had an impact on the Israelis. Their soldiers are complaining about the conditions at the checkpoint due to the smoke and fumes coming from the tip. As a consequence the municipality has been offered a million sheikels to remove the tip immediately.  It enrages the Palestinians that their anxieties about the poisons coming from Israeli chemical works and toxic dumping are systematically ignored but when a handful of soldiers are affected they are expected to jump.

In any event the demand is absurd. The municipality want to move the tip but to do so immediately without researching and locating a site would be madness. Further, the Israelis want the dump moved immediately but will not release appropriate land (in Area C) to allow this to happen!

As further evidence of the growing environmental crisis on the West Bank, and how it is intimately linked with the Occupation, we thought the following article might prove interesting.
It is taken from: http://www.countercurrents.org/frykberg290308.htm

West Bank Faces Toxic Waste Crisis

By Mel Frykberg

29 March, 2008
Aljazeera

The West Bank has become a dumping site for hazardous waste -?which is making residents sick, say Israeli and Palestinian environmental groups.

Several weeks ago, villagers from Jima'in in the Nablus district complained that Israeli trucks were again dumping waste on Palestinian land.

Ayman Abu Thaher, the?deputy director-general of the Palestinian Authority's Environmental Awareness Directorate said such?dumping has been going on for years.

"The Israelis are using the West Bank as a cheap and easy alternative for dumping their waste at the expense of the health of Palestinians,"?he said.

According to Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), a joint Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmental group, improper dumping of contaminants and waste has over time become a threat to?the region's drinking water.

Toxic percolation

In 2006, FoEME published a?report, "A Seeping Time Bomb, Pollution of the Mountain Aquifer by Solid Waste," which found that the unsustainable disposal of solid waste has resulted in the percolation of toxic substances including chloride, arsenic and heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury and lead into the groundwater.

Since the 2006 report was released,?the German government has built a new solid waste disposal project near Ramallah and?the World Bank and the EU have also completed another solid waste landfill facility near Jenin.

But Mira Epstein, a spokeswoman for FoEME, said that despite the improvements, the threat to drinking water and the environment persist today.

Over three million people reside in the recharge area of the aquifer, which falls under both the West Bank and parts of Israel. The population includes 2.3 million Palestinians, 235,000 Israeli settlers and 500,000 Israelis living within Israel's internationally recognized borders.

Bassem Abu Mahdi, the director of primary health services in Salfit, which is located near a dump site in the northern West Bank, said an "increasing number of people have been diagnosed with cancer, amoebic dysentery, diarrhea and other related diseases".

He cited the dumping of hazardous waste as a cause of the increase.

Accusing Israel

Abu Thaher, told Al Jazeera that some Israeli companies were dumping waste in the Palestinian territories rather than resorting to the official hazardous waste treatment site, Ramot Havav, in southern Israel.

In 1985, Israeli pesticide company Geshuri closed operations in Kfar Sava and relocated to Tulkarem in the northern West Bank after Israeli residents petitioned for and obtained a court order for the company to move.

They had accused the company of being responsible for an increase in pollution-related health issues.

"A number of Israeli companies have relocated to the West Bank to avoid the strict environmental laws governing the disposal of waste, particularly hazardous waste in Israel," Abu Thaher told Al Jazeera.

Palestinians burning garbage

But Tzali Greenberg, a spokesman for Israel's Environment Ministry, told Al Jazeera that the country's strict environmental laws?are also enforced on Israeli companies operating in the Palestinian territories.

"There is no difference to us between Israeli and Palestinian waste," Greenberg said.

"It all gets treated the same and we follow perpetrators who break the law equally and we think people who are serious about this should contact us with the necessary evidence."

"We will be happy to follow up and take legal action."

Zecharya Tagar, from the Israeli division of FoEME, said most of the waste produced in the West Bank?came from Palestinians, who comprise the majority of the population in the area.

He added that the biggest threat to both the environment and health in the region was the continual burning of waste by Palestinians.

"This is causing the air to be filled with carcinogenic particles which Palestinians are breathing in on a daily basis," Tagar said.

"Furthermore, Israel does not have a policy of dumping in the West Bank and to the best of our knowledge, this is complied with by the public sector."

Security trumps?

But the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ), a?NGO dedicated to promoting sustainable development in the occupied Palestinian territories,?says waste from illegal Israeli settlements is the major problem.

"Wastewater from the settlements is not restricted to domestic effluent but includes pesticides, asbestos, batteries, cement and aluminum which contain carcinogenic and hazardous compounds,"?ARIJ recently reported.

It also accused Israeli authorities of being lenient on settlers who broke the law.

The faltering peace process has also contributed to the problem. The joint Israeli-Palestinian Environmental Experts Committee, established under the Oslo Accords, has not met since 1999, forcing coordination on the issue of solid waste to be done in an ad hoc manner.

The dumping of untreated medical waste, including used syringes randomly discarded in garbage dumps, continues largely because of?restrictions on movement that the Israeli army argues is necessary for security reasons.

The extensive closures and roadblocks have also made it hard for wastewater tankers to reach the many Palestinian communities that are not connected to main sewage systems and are dependent on cesspits and these tankers for disposal of waste.

We have already discussed the environmental crisis engulfing the Palestinian West Bank. Waste and garbage from illegal Settlements, illegal dumping of toxic waste and industrial and chemical polution from Israeli factories operating under Israeli control within the West Bank.

Today we met the Director of Public Health in Tulkarm and he told us of the harm being inflicted on the people of Tulkarm by the Industrial Zone next to the city. The Industrial Zone is on the West Bank but in a 'C Area' (meaning the local authority has no jurisdiction over polutants, health and safety or other controls on the activities within the factories).

The Authority has various reports showing the increased levels of toxic waste and gas being emitted from the Zone - but there is little they can do about it. The Health Officials told us the fumes destroy fertile land, and cause a range of health problems for Palestinians living in the city.

But the Zone also presents a 'problem' for Israel: the smoke and gas fumes are carried on the air and potentially threaten the health of Israelis and those living in the near-by (illegal) Settlement.

Generally, the prevailing winds blow these fumes into Tulkarm - but occassionally the wind changes direction and the toxic fumes are blown back towards Israel. This caused some controversy within Israel and so, two weeks ago, the Israeli Supreme Court instructed the factories to shut down production and close air-vents when the wind is likely to blow the fumes back towards Israel. Nothing was said about the continuous threat to Palestinian health.