PALESTINIAN children returned to their school after the weekend to find that a 24ft concrete wall had been built through the playground, leaving the classrooms on one side and the football pitch and volleyball court on the other.

The Anata boys’ high school play area now lies on the Israeli side of the towering wall of prefabricated concrete blocks, which is part of its controversial 435-mile “security barrier”. The land will be annexed by the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Zeev.

“It’s made life hell,” Mahdi Hamdan, 15, one of the 800 pupils at the school, said. “There’s no normal learning, no normal education. Israel put the wall here to let us know they control us, to show there’s nothing we can do to get our freedom or resist.”

“We feel like we’re in a prison,” Hisham Mahmud, also 15, said. “School isn’t what it used to be. We used to stay after lessons to play football, but now we go straight home to avoid friction with the soldiers.” The barrier has blotted out the sunlight from some classrooms. It has also led to the abrupt cancellation of the soccer league.

The construction workers, accompanied by soldiers, appeared without warning, triggering clashes with some pupils and villagers. The soldiers responded with teargas and stun grenades and a number of arrests were made.

Youssef Elayan, the school principal, said that the Palestinian Authority’s Education Ministry had filed a complaint in Jerusalem’s High Court, but he was adamant that the Israeli authorities could easily have chosen a different path.

“For sure it could have been built elsewhere,” he said. “It is obvious there were lots of places it could have been built. But they put it here out of spite.”

Israel maintains that the separation barrier — a combination of concrete, razor wire, ditches and electronic fence — is vital to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers. Hundreds of civilians have been killed in suicide attacks in the past five years. Israel says that the barrier, less than half complete, has cut attacks significantly.

But as sections of it snake their way through and around Jerusalem’s outlying fringes, it is having many unintended detrimental effects on the Jewish and Palestinian populations of what Israel deems its “eternal and undivided capital”.

A study to be published soon by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies argues that the barrier will diminish the city’s regional centre status, weaken its economic prospects, damage tourism and enrage Palestinian inhabitants.

“Even if one assumes that Palestinian suicide terror attacks will be prevented by the security fence, the frustrations and rage felt by a third of Jerusalem’s Palestinian population will deepen hostility,” Israel Kimhi, the author of the report, writes. “The fence is likely to increase the number of east Jerusalem residents who participate in terror attacks.”

The barrier, which the International Court of Justice in The Hague has ruled illegal and says should be torn down where it crosses into the West Bank, has also had dramatic effects on the population of Jerusalem.

Arab residents of suburbs flanking Jerusalem have abandoned their homes in droves and moved inside the city to avoid being cut off. In the nearby village of al-Zayyim the exodus is acute as 90 per cent of the population hold Jerusalem identity cards, giving them the right to live in the city and social benefits denied other West Bank Palestinians.

In the past year a quarter of the village’s 4,000 inhabitants fled as the barrier marched closer over nearby hillsides. They feared that when completed it would sever them from jobs, family and services, and ultimately rob them of their coveted “Jerusalemite” status.

Al-Zayyim is fast becoming a dusty ghost town as properties empty. Prices have plunged by 40 per cent while work on half-completed apartment blocks has been halted.

THE BARRIER

The barrier will separate 12 per cent of Palestinians — 280,000 — from their lands

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