"Is it true their women can't go out in public now?" an Israeli soldier asked me over cappuccino at a shopping mall just outside the Gaza Strip after Hamas Islamists seized the enclave. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, I'm as often asked to describe lives being led only a few miles down the road, to neighbours who no longer meet. What has struck me is seeing people locked in, and locked out, by a spreading labyrinth of boundaries and parallel worlds, all in an area just a third the size of my native Scotland.Īs a Reuters correspondent, I'm used to explaining what I see to people living a world away. JERUSALEM, June 21 (Reuters) - With one last exit stamp in my passport, I end a three-year reporting assignment in the Holy Land that has been marked by images of frontiers, by a sense of walls going up and fewer and fewer people finding a way through.įrom the minefields of Israel's frontlines with Syria and Lebanon to the fortified fences around the West Bank and Gaza Strip - much in this month's headlines - to the walls, old and new, of Jerusalem, physical barriers shape the lives of the 12 million people cut off here in what was once called Palestine.īut those lives, and millions more touched by events that reach far beyond these borders, are marked, too, by less visible internal frontiers - religious, cultural, ethnic, political.
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