by Rima Merriman

The scene is tragic and unnerving but it has become astonishingly routine - the deadly routine that imposes ordinariness on the outrageous and unconscionable.

The checkpoint at Qalandia is taking shape irrevocably as a permanent bottleneck and border crossing that cuts off the illegally annexed East Jerusalem along with some 28 Palestinian villages from the rest of the West Bank.

There is a substantial amount of small commerce that has cropped up around this roadblock. The place has the look of a flea market. You can find men and boys hawking everything, from vegetables to cheap household goods, to books to live chickens to flowers to shish kebabs. The colourful umbrellas that the vendors set up for shade look incongruously festive among the rubble, but they can't hide the litter that is piling up or the polluted water trenches or the dust.

There is also the daily chaos and congestion of cars, trucks and vans, and of Palestinian pedestrians, young and old, making passage and submitting themselves to checking as they exit from the Ramallah side to the East Jerusalem side and back again. Around this hub is the din of heavy machinery pulverising rock and levelling the high ground right next to the checkpoint structure with its turnstile gate. So far, the digging has left intact the rock on which an Israeli lookout is perched.