The Ledger · 1 August 2003
CP-2003-025
West Bank Security Wall Fuels More Palestinian Anger Against Israel
By LARA SUKHTIAN / The Associated Press
Transcribed from the clipping
QALQILIYA, West Bank — Khaled Amer’s family tilled their vegetable fields and guava groves for three generations — until Israel cut their land in half with a security barrier it’s building in the West Bank.
Amer’s story is no rarity in Qalqiliya: the town is walled off on three sides by a combination of concrete walls, fences, razor-wire and trenches that residents say is strangling their livelihood and feeding anger at Israel.
“If they want a security wall, why don’t they build it on their land?” asks Amer, gazing through the fence at fields he hasn’t been able to tend for five months. “This is the land that I live off, this is the land that feeds me, and now they’ve come and taken it away.”
The obstructions around Qalqiliya are part of a 370-mile-long barrier Israel is building near the dividing line with the West Bank, arguing it is needed to keep out Palestinian militants who have killed hundreds of Israelis in three years of violence.
But, in some areas, the barrier plunges deep into the West Bank to encompass larger Israeli settlements, effectively gobbling up Palestinian areas, splitting towns from their hinterlands and blocking Palestinians from jobs in Israel or other parts of the West Bank.
Perhaps no town along the route of the barrier better illustrates the reasons for Palestinian anger over the project — and the Israeli rationale for it — than Qalqiliya.
How this transcription was made
Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.
Context added by this archive
Date check: No masthead, folio or printed date appears on this clipping — the trim starts immediately above the headline. The caption dates the demonstration to “Thursday”, consistent with a Friday paper; Aug. 1, 2003 was a Friday. Nothing on the clipping names the newspaper.
Cite this clipping
"West Bank Security Wall Fuels More Palestinian Anger Against Israel," The Ledger, 1 August 2003. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2003-025. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2003-025
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- All 516 clippings from the 2000s →
Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2003-025.
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