In the Village of Nowhere, a Fate Soon Sealed

"We never knew this was part of Jerusalem until they told us that," Yusef recalled. "The inspector who told us was surprised to see we had West Bank identification. We told him everyone here did."

Some residents began appealing to the Interior Ministry for residency rights, though none were successful. All building in the village was frozen. On a hilltop, construction for the Jewish settlement expansion began rising. It is now visible from the window of Yusef's comfortable living room.

Israeli planning maps show that Har Homa's "D" neighborhood is to be built in the years ahead on the hilltop where his home is now. Yusef runs a 30-person construction crew at the site of the settlement, but on this day Israel had closed the territories and kept his men from reaching the job, despite their permits.

"No one wants to work on land that belongs to Arabs," Yusef, a father of six, said with a thin smile. "But you have to feed your family."

The Daily Crossing

By 6:30 a.m., clusters of children began gathering outside homes and filing onto the road in the village. Samar and Yara Darawi, Jamal's daughters, were among the bundled crowd.

Students from the village went to school in Jerusalem for years. In 1995, two years after the Oslo accords, the Israelis began turning them away. The students lived inside the city limits, but the Israelis said their parents held West Bank residency documents, based on the census decades earlier, and the children were no longer allowed in Jerusalem schools.

After Oslo, as the two societies began a complicated separation, Nuaman found itself in a crack between them. Although the village was part of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority assumed responsibility for its water, electricity and telephone services. Village residents turned to Bethlehem for medical care, but were forced to navigate new Israeli checkpoints along the one road to the outside world.

In her blue-and-white striped school smock, Samar, along with her sister and cousins, walked pensively across the valley -- out of Jerusalem and into the West Bank. The children cast shifting shadows against the exposed hillside, carved out for the new road. Once the fence is complete, the children of Nuaman will have to pass through a chain-link barrier, manned by Israeli soldiers, to reach their school.

On this day, however, the soldiers were huddled against the chill, inside an armored personnel carrier that sat near the site where the terminal will be built. Coils of concertina wire marked the location.

Only the patter of light footsteps sounded as the children wound their way down the road to the valley floor, Samar's long single braid bouncing against her pink backpack. Two days earlier, the Darawi girls had not gone to school because they were frightened to cross the Israeli checkpoint. Samar, flushed cheeks beneath brown eyes, said Israeli soldiers had searched her backpack and torn up a map of historic Palestine she had inside.

This day the soldiers waved and smiled at the children. As they climbed past a small graveyard, the mood lightened. Samar and her friends began jostling each other along the footpath, laughing and shouting. Yara turned toward kindergarten, housed in the town council building. Samar and the others stopped at a corner grocery to buy grape drinks and lollipops.

"Now there is no fear," Samar said. "We have passed."