Palestinian despair at Olmert’s talk of peace

Ehud Olmert's bold declaration on Sunday that a peace deal with the Palestinians was "closer than ever" rings hollow among the oppressed Palestinian communities of the West Bank. As Olmert made his upbeat speech in Paris, 5,000 residents of the town of Nilin were still contemplating life under military curfew for much of the previous week, as punishment for their protests against the separation wall being constructed by the Israelis on their land.

The wall, which was built as a response to the wave of terrorist attacks in 2002, snakes its way across the Occupied Territories, annexing vast swathes of Palestinian land and water reserves. Around 75 per cent of the barrier has been completed to date and, despite the talk of peace, there is no prospect of the project being halted.

The people's protest in Nilin was to mark

the fourth anniversary of the International Court of Justice declaration - known here as the 'so-called Hague Ruling' - that the construction of the wall was illegal. Israel thumbed its nose at the court and went ahead regardless.

Last week's curfew in Nilin has been condemned as 'collective punishment' by local activists and human rights groups, and the behaviour of the Israel Defence Forces during the shutdown denounced as immoral.

The trail of destruction left by Israeli troops is evident across the length of the town: hulls of burned out cars litter the roadside, buildings are peppered with bullet-holes and ransacked houses bear the scars of a fierce incursion by the troops.

"Look what they did to me," screams an elderly grandmother, hoisting up her robes to display the raw wounds inflicted by soldiers who, she says, threw her against a stone wall during a raid. Several other residents were hospitalised with gunshot wounds.

The people of Nilin have been at the centre of a long, and often violent, struggle against the annexation of farmland by the Israeli