Nablus

(The service taxis wait for passengers at Qalandiya checkpoint)

Today I arrived in Nablus, one of the most populated cities in Palestine.* Two things are immediately apparent about the place. First, it is a more conservative city than Ramallah or Bethlehem. Almost all the women here wear the hijab. There is no (ready) source of alcohol. And there are posters of martyrs everywhere.

The second thing you notice immediately is that this is a city under siege. The Israelis literally peer down at the city from the neighbouring mountains. Nablus is situated between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. Upon one of these mountains lies a giant mansion owned by a Palestinian telecommunications magnate. The other is an Israeli base (pictured below). If you look closely you can see a light-coloured line running across the mountain. That line marks the boundary between the Israeli military installation on the top and the city of Nablus. Another mountain around Nablus also has an Israeli base on top of it. Pat, an Australian law student teaching English and learning Arabic here, told me that the top of this mountain (circled in the picture below) is used by Israeli snipers. These snipers usually aim, extra-judicially as they do, at suspected militants. However, they have even killed children and elderly persons! The things you don't hear about on CNN...
The old city of Nablus has a great deal of character. Sadly, it is the sight of routine skirmishes between the Israelis and Palestinian militants. Because of this, the alley-like walkways of the old city are marked with bullet holes and generally are in poor condition.
Several nights each week, Israeli soldiers sweeped through the narrow streets of the old city in armoured vehicles. This inevitably leads to fierce gun battles with local militants, most of whom are with Islamic Jihad or Fatah. I had a Turkish bath last night in the old city as a gun battle raged briefly above.

As mentioned earlier, photos of the 'shaheed' or martyrs are literally plastered everywhere. Even the glass causeway surrounding the hotel lift had a few. These are the sports stars, the heroes who are liberally advertised throughout this besieged city. Although the principle behind the pictures of the shaheed is to showcase those who have been killed by Israel during the Occupation, many of these young men have actually been killed by friendly fire. Such are the dangers of machine guns in the dark alleys of old Nablus. When you walk through the old city at night it's not uncommon to see kids as young as 15 straddling machine guns.

Tomorrow I'm going to a village called Salem just outside Nablus.

* As usual Wikipedia has a good entry on Nablus here.