At the northern edge of Jerusalem, on the main road to the Palestinian city of Ramallah, three towering concrete walls are converging around a rapidly built maze of cages, turnstiles and bombproof rooms.
When construction at Qalandiya is completed in the coming weeks, the remaining gaps in the 26-foot (eight-meter) walls will close and those still permitted to travel between the two cities will be channeled through a warren of identity and security checks reminiscent of an international frontier.
The Israeli military built the crossing without fanfare over recent months, along with other similar posts along the length of the vast new "security barrier" that is enveloping Jerusalem, while the world's attention was focused on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip.
But these de facto border posts are just one element in a web of construction evidently intended to redraw Israel's borders deep inside the Palestinian territories and secure all of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and to do it fast so as to put the whole issue beyond negotiation. As foreign leaders, including Tony Blair, praised Sharon for his "courage" in pulling out of Gaza last month, Israel was accelerating construction of the West Bank barrier, expropriating more land in the West Bank than it was surrendering in Gaza, and building thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements.
"It's a trade-off: the Gaza Strip for the settlement blocks; the Gaza Strip for Palestinian land; the Gaza Strip for unilaterally imposing borders," said Dror Etkes, director of the Israeli organization Settlement Watch. "They don't know how long they've got. That's why they're building like maniacs."
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