Hayes-White was observing the exercise as part of a four-day conference on counterterrorism that attracted 130 U.S. law enforcement, emergency services and homeland security officials, the largest such delegation ever hosted by Israel. Other officials in the 23-member California delegation included San Francisco Deputy Police Chief Greg Suhr, Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and Erroll Southers, deputy director of the California Office of Homeland Security.

At Wednesday's chemical attack drill, simulating a poison-gas attack on a school, first on the scene were an ambulance and a police cruiser. As the "victims" collapsed, rescue personnel donned protective gear in different colors to distinguish between those securing the scene and those helping victims. Arriving firefighters were responsible for isolating the toxic material, while a police helicopter overhead kept an eye out for escaping terrorists and monitored traffic flow.

Within minutes, more than 50 security and rescue personnel were on the scene, under the command of the senior police officer. The senior medic performed triage, tagging all victims according to the seriousness of their injuries -- and within 20 minutes all were on their way to a hospital. Finally, all the suited emergency officers were washed down in special showers connected to fire trucks.

"That's smart," said a sheriff's officer from California. "Back home, we'd have to find a hydrant to get those showers going. We never thought to hook them up to the fire trucks."

"It was truly impressive," Hayes-White said of the exercise as she packed away the shirt to take home for her 12-year-old son.

"Our whole world changed after 9/11. It is something that we plan for now, but we have very little expertise in it. We've studied it, but we haven't really lived it. To come to a place like this, really you're learning from the true experts," she said.

On Tuesday, the Americans thought the day's exercise had started early when they arrived at the national headquarters of the Israeli Border Police in Jerusalem and saw a series of roadblocks set up and emergency vehicles screaming out of the gates, sirens wailing.

But this was no drill. They were caught in the middle of the real thing.

Israeli Police Chief Moshe Karadi welcomed his guests with the news that a Palestinian suicide bomber was loose in the city.

"They brought us in and gave us a step-by-step playback of the events as they were unfolding," said Hayes-White.

An hour later, after they were briefed about a dramatic helicopter and motorcycle chase through police roadblocks on the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, Hayes-White and the U.S. delegates were told the suicide bomber had been captured, together with 15 pounds of explosives packed with nails and shrapnel. A suicide attack had been prevented, thanks to accurate intelligence and swift police reaction.

It was a real-time introduction to the pressures of security in Israel for participants in the four-day conference, hosted by the Border Police and the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Participants attended intelligence briefings, counterterror drills, medical exercises and lectures from security, police and emergency services officials.

The Americans toured police surveillance facilities in the Old City of Jerusalem, visited a suicide-bomber exhibition at police headquarters and observed a full-blown counterterror exercise simulating a biochemical attack on a school, followed by emergency treatment of the mock victims at the Assaf Harofeh Medical Center.

At Ben-Gurion Airport and the control center for Israel Railways, the officials viewed state-of-the-art closed-circuit TV facilities with what the Israelis call behavioral video -- computer software that triggers an alarm when an unusual incident appears on the monitor.

Paul MacMillan, deputy chief of Boston's transit police, said the Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority had been considering the installation of behavioral video. After seeing the Israeli system, he said he planned to recommend it: "We've been looking at it ... but we've never really seen it in actual operation."

The aim of the conference was to encourage cooperation in sharing information and training, and before the sessions ended, several U.S. officials were already planning joint training seminars with the Israelis for U.S. law enforcement officials.

Southers said he planned to hold a similar conference for state homeland security employees in conjunction with the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles. MacMillan said he would like to send his bomb-disposal teams to train in Israel, where police receive 200,000 alerts of suspicious packages every year.

"This country has excelled in safety and public security," Southers said of Israel. "What really strikes me here is that preparedness and security is a culture. It's something that we don't understand in the U.S. There are people in California who have zero resolve when it comes to this issue."

Suhr, the San Francisco deputy chief, said the trip had been "hugely useful." He said the analysis of mass-casualty incidents offered by lecturers were the best he had ever heard, and he intended to take them back home for training purposes.

"I've been doing this for 25 years, and I usually don't write anything. I just take the material they hand out," said Suhr. "This week, I've taken pages of notes because the things they say just strike you."

After four 16-hour days, the participants were joking grimly about graduating from the Israeli boot camp.

"The Israelis have kept us out of trouble," said one bleary-eyed participant. "I haven't even had time to buy gifts for my kids."

One does not have to be Avigdor Lieberman to be a racist. The "peace" proposed by Ehud Olmert is no less racist. Lieberman wants to distance them from our borders, Olmert and his ilk want to distance them from out consciousness. Nobody is speaking about peace with them, nobody really wants it. Only one ambition unites everyone - to get rid of them, one way or another. Transfer or wall, "disengagement" or "convergence" – the point is that they should get out of our sight. The only game in town, the 'unilateral arrangement," is not only based on the lie that there is no partner, is not only based exclusively on our "needs" because of a sense of superiority, but also leads to a dangerous pattern of behavior that totally ignores the existence of the other nation.

The problem is that this feeling is based entirely on an illusory assumption. The Palestinians are here, just like us. They will, therefore, be forced to continue to remind us of their existence in the one way they and we both know, through violence and terror.

This gloomy chapter in the history of Israel began at Camp David, when Ehud Barak succeeded in planting the untruth that there is nobody to talk to on the Palestinian side, that we offered them the sky and they responded with violence. Then came the major terror attacks and Israeli society withdrew into a sickness of apathy never before known to it. While it used to demonstrate complete indifference toward Palestinian suffering, that apathy spread and intensified to include weak Israelis - Arabs, the poor, the ailing. From that aspect the current election campaign, more boring than ever, seems almost like an expression of the state of public caring. Nothing can awaken the Israelis from their coma - not the imprisonment of the nation next door, not the killing and destruction that we sow in their society and not the suffering of the weak among us.

Who would have believed that in Israel of 2006, the killing of an 8-year-old girl at short range, as happened last week in Yamoun, would barely be mentioned; that the ruthless attempt to expel an Ethiopian with AIDS who is married to an Israeli, just because he is not Jewish, would not raise hue and cry; and that the results of a poll showing that a majority of Israelis - 68 percent - don't want to live next to an Arab, did not raise a stink. If in 1981, tomatoes were being thrown at Shimon Peres and in 1995, there was incitement against Yitzhak Rabin, now there are no tomatoes, no incitement and not even any election rallies.

Nothing can get the Israelis out to the streets, nothing can enrage them. An election without involvement and interest is more dangerous to democracy than any tomato. It is a demonstration of apathy and indifference, which the regime can exploit to do whatever it wants. The fact that there are no real differences between the three main parties, with this one saying nearly the entire country is mine, and that one saying nearly the entire country is mine, is bad news for democracy. The coming elections have been decided already. A massive majority will cast its vote for the racist arrangement that ignores the Palestinians, as proposed by Kadima, Likud and, to a large extent, Labor. None of them tried to propose a just peace; their leaders never said a word about the war crimes and suffering caused by Israel. They'll be joined by the extreme right and the ultra-Orthodox, and there you have it: a nation in which racism is the real common denominator uniting us all. Nearly everyone will say no to peace, yes to the continuing occupation (even if it is in new camouflage) and yes to the total focusing on ourselves.

Morality has become a dirty work, and the worst corruption in the country's history, the occupation, was never mentioned. Only one-sided maps, similar to one another, all including the humongous "settlement blocs," a withdrawal based on "our needs," with a separation wall and the frightening air of indifference hovering above it all.

There has, indeed, been a dramatic turn in opinion. It's very hard to recall the esteem and goodwill in which Israel once basked, not least on the broad liberal left, where there is now a received view that Israel has deserved this change in affections: that Israel and Zionism are vicious now, having been virtuous once. The view may be almost universal - but is it true?

You can hear echoes of the shift in these pages. It might be a columnist recalling the early 1960s, when progressive young friends (mine too) would go from London to spend the summer on a kibbutz in that heroic land. Or it might be Sir Gerald Kaufman bitterly denouncing the present Israeli government by comparison with "the beautiful democratic Israel" that he first knew in the 1950s.

In the age of Jenin, and now Jericho, of "targeted killings" and F-16s blasting refugee camps, that turn in Israel's reputation might seem natural enough. And yet there is a contrary case to be made, that Israel has in some ways been criticised too harshly over the past 20 years, having been judged too leniently in its first 20.

It is really very hard to explain to anyone under the age of 50 just how popular Israel once was, notably among European social democrats and our own Labour party. In the 50s, newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian and the Observer (for all the trauma of Suez) accepted axiomatically that Zionism was a force for good, and David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, would be profiled in the New Statesman in what were frankly rhapsodic terms.

There were several reasons for this, from traditional liberal philosemitism to horror and shame at the fate of the European Jews. Besides that, in the nearly three decades after 1948, when Israel was run by Labour, it was widely, if myopically, seen as a model social democracy. The change began with the 1967 war, when Israel's former admirers began to condemn the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and was accelerated when Likud took over as the dominant party.

And yet those admirers missed some salient truths. That beautiful democratic Israel of 50 years ago was founded on ethnic cleansing. The later expansion of Israel was actually less brutal: after 1967 a number of Palestinians were uprooted, but there was nothing to compare with the wholesale expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948 - an event to which the right-thinking liberal west closed its eyes at the time.

Even the settlements in the occupied territories, which Israel almost light-heartedly (and in the end hubristically) began in the 1970s, were often set up on empty land, a contrast indeed to the settling of Palestine in earlier generations. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages," Moshe Dayan briskly admitted about the creation of his country: "There is not one single place that did not have a former Arab population."

In Dayan's words you hear something else, the greater candour more often found among Israelis themselves than among their western supporters - and also the candour of the Israeli right, which was much less given to evasion and denial than the Labour establishment. In those long years of Labour supremacy, the right was not merely out of office, but was anathematised and scorned. Very few people in the west really knew much about Zionism, certainly not about a rightwing revisionist tradition "of greater intellectual distinction" than Labour Zionism; the phrase is Perry Anderson's in the New Left Review, a tribute from an unlikely source, but perfectly correct.

The revisionist movement was founded in the early 1920s and led, until his death in 1940, by Vladimir Jabotinsky, perhaps the one man of genius to have been produced by Zionism. Not only of greater intellectual distinction, Jabotinsky was marked by his greater intellectual honesty. He argued that if the Zionist project was justifiable at all, then it had to accept that the Palestinian Arabs were not going to surrender their land without a fight - why should they? - and that force would be necessary.

Paradoxically, his honesty may have made it possible for Labour to appear enlightened and moderate by comparison, although there were always some Israelis who saw that claim as an imposture. The late Israel Shahak, an advanced radical and "non-Zionist Israeli", used to insist not only that he himself had always been treated better by conservatives than by the official left, but also that Labour simply did not enjoy its reputation for comparative decency, and that the state Labour had created was in many ways neither democratic not beautiful.

By now, the older political distinctions have anyway largely been eroded. As the sociologist Uri Ram has said (with a touch of ethnic sarcasm): "The major players in the socio-political drama taking place in Israel today are of the right: the socio-economic liberal right of the capitalist upper classes - called in Israel 'the left' - and the ethno-religious fundamentalist right of the labouring lower classes - called in Israel 'the people'."

It is the latter right that seems certain to win the election this month, and continue its intransigent policies. One ironical outcome will be to further encourage the historically obtuse view of the conflict that liberals have long nurtured.

· Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma, which won an American National Jewish Book Award

When Palestinian deaths occur, especially fighters' deaths, the Israeli Government's version of the story is taken as fact in the mainstream U.S. media. In most cases, articles covering the death of Palestinians only include large Israeli quotes, without citing Palestinian witnesses and other credible nongovernmental organization sources. This continues to be the case after human rights groups have released reports stating Israel has indiscriminately shot at civilians, even using them as human shields. In as early as 2001, Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated, "At least 470 Palestinians have been killed, most of them unlawfully by Israeli security forces when their lives [Israeli Security Forces] and the lives of others were not in danger." Since the AI/HRW report, more than 3350 Palestinians have been killed. It is remarkable how so many can accept Israeli Government as the sole, objective source when it forcibly occupies the Palestinian territories.

On August 25, 2005 the headline on CNN.com read, "Israel: Five Militants Shot in Raid." The article claims the fighters were suspected of being involved in a bomb attack; they were armed and exchanged fire with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), and five Palestinians were shot. The report also mentions the town Netanya, where the bombing referenced in the article took place, was a frequent sight for bomb attacks by Palestinians. No Palestinian quote, no witnesses giving an alternative perspective, and no mention that three of the victims shot were under the age of 18.

The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, covered the same event including Palestinian quotes and some Palestinian claims. The paper reported that the IOF killed five Palestinians on August 25, three of whom Palestinian sources say are between the ages of 14 and 17 with no known links to any armed groups. Four of the victims died at the scene, while one of the young victims died later that night.

Varying Palestinian reporters cited witnesses claiming all five Palestinians were unarmed, including the two fighters killed. This was the first fatal attack since the "disengagement" of the Gaza Strip.

The contrast in coverage between CNN and Haaretz is staggering. The CNN headline was written in absolutes: "5 militants shot in raid." The CNN article continues by stating only the Israeli claim that five "militants" were killed, making the headline biased and misleading. The Haaretz headline read: "U.S. urges restraint after IDF raid that killed 5 Palestinians." This headline refers to the people who were shot as Palestinians and not solely fighters. The Haaretz article covers conflicting Israeli and Palestinian claims, which made it impossible to determine whether or not all five killed were "militants" or civilians.

On September 7 the findings of a probe, conducted by Haaretz and the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, found that three of the five Palestinians killed in the assault on August 25 were under the age of 18 and did not have any links to known armed groups. Their investigation also found that the two fighters killed were low ranking operatives who were not armed at the time. This repudiates the Israeli claim that IOF soldiers were in the area involved in an operation against leaders of Palestinian armed groups and a "ticking bomb" with connection to bomb attacks in Israel.

"Ticking bombs" are characterized as individuals that are an imminent physical threat to the state of Israel or people holding information that imminently threaten the security of the state of Israel. In most cases, "ticking bombs" are referred to as would be human bombers or those holding valuable information on individuals carrying out those bombing.

Israel used the "ticking bomb" scenario in the past as an excuse to torture Palestinians with impunity. In a 1998 study on the "ticking bomb" scenario, B'Tselem found Israel's claim that it is necessary to use torture against "ticking bombs" was in most cases "totally unsubstantiated." The recent findings of Haaretz and B'Tselem deeply call into question the reliability of the state of Israel on affairs in the Occupied Territories and reaffirm the notion that using Israel as the sole source is careless and unacceptable.

Israel professes it doesn't have the death penalty, but it has in the past and "maintains the right" in the future, to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of "wanted" Palestinians. Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz admitted on August 26 that Israel invaded and fired first in the incident that killed five Palestinians, while maintaining the notion that the fighters-meaning all five killed-were armed. Again, Israel, the occupying force, reserves the "right" to play God with the lives of the Palestinian people. There are many examples of unarmed children and disabled Palestinians being injured or killed by Israeli forces. More than 875 women and children have died since the start of the conflict under the guise of security. Nearly 25 percent of the children killed were under the age of 12.
Coincidence or Collusion?

Why are "left wing" media outlets such as The New York Times and CNN not reporting the Palestinian side of the story? Well the simple answer is The New York Times and CNN are not liberal, nor honest. They cover injustices only when there is no risk of backlash from readers and advertisers. The media moguls are only "aware" and objective when it pays them to be. CNN and The New York Times must vet their content, so as not to be viewed as "pro-Palestinian," in fear that advertisers will pull their ads or commercials, leading to a loss in revenue.

Israel solidified itself as the strategic ally of the U.S. in the Middle East after its victory in the Six Day War (1967 Arab/Israeli War). Israel was taken under the wing of the U.S.-which saw its potential as a strategic, military, and political force.

The rise of religious Zionism after 1967 and the subsequent call for the preservation of the Jewish homeland became relevant in America with the Jewish elite as well with Christian conservatives. Jewish historian, Norman Finkelstein, recalls in his book The Holocaust Industry,

"Accordingly, American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel. After the 1967 war, Israel's military élan could be celebrated because its guns point in the right direction-against America's enemies."

Finkelstein continued to state, "Now they [The Jewish elite] could pose as the natural interlocutors for America's newest strategic asset. From bit players, they could advance to top billing in the Cold War drama. Thus for American Jewry, as well as the United States, Israel became a strategic asset."

The effectiveness of the pro-Israeli lobby hinges on the willingness of the U.S. government to support Israel. According to the strongly pro-Israeli website the Jewish Virtual Library, the U.S. has given Israel nearly 50 billion dollars in aid from 1974 to 1997. If the U.S. government didn't have significant interests in backing Israel, the pro-Israeli lobby would be less of a factor much like the Palestinian lobby. Interestingly, the Jewish Lobby only supported Israel when it was in their interests to do so.

The convergence of American and Israeli support found success in delegitimizing the Palestinian cause. This consequently washed Israel's hands clean in U.S. eyes of the atrocities committed throughout the Middle East-i.e. the invasion and indiscriminate bombing of Beirut in 1982-and more directly to the Palestinian people through dispossession and occupation. Strikingly, the American media refuses to differentiate between the past suffering of the Jewish people and the suffering Israelis endure due to inept Israeli policy which has besieged the Palestinian people for 58 years.

Consider the backlash professors at Colombia received because they were accused of promoting anti-Semitism. In reality Joseph Massad, one of the accused professors, and others simply critiqued the Israeli government. As a result, pro-Israeli groups like the David Project and Campus Watch tried to silence their right to free speech. Just as questioning the war in Iraq is "un-American," the idea of questioning Israeli actions is "anti-Semitic." Ridiculous assertions such as equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a way in which the pro-Israeli lobby restricts the media from criticizing Israel or fairly reporting matters.

In a post-9/11 world, it has been much easier to side with mostly European Israelis, who look more like Americans, who love capitalism like Americans, and who are fighting "Arab terror" like Americans.

Unfortunately for the Palestinians, the media doesn't like to diverge from mainstream political correctness. If objectivity was the top priority of the media, they would not have dropped the ball in the coverage leading up to the war in Iraq. Even Bob Woodward of the "liberal" Washington Post admitted, "We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder.

But who would really push the American/Israeli agenda, besides those fearing backlash? The neoconservatives and Christian coalitions in support for Israel. The Pat Robertsons and the Billy Grahams. Neoconservative talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Best selling authors Alan Dershowitz and Thomas Friedman. Lobbying groups like AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), and attack dogs such as Daniel Pipes and his cronies in Campus Watch. The fortune 500 companies such as Caterpillar, McDonalds, Disney and Starbucks to name a few. But most damningly, it's the "liberals," that complete the majority support. Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, the honest broker himself Bill Clinton, the heads of The New York Times, CNN and the rest of the "left wing" media that won't stand up for what's morally right. These people are too selfish or too weak to do what's right, and off with the heads of those who do.

The dilemma of the "free press" in America is that it isn't free. The media hinges on the support of the people, newspaper subscriptions, television viewership, advertisements, and the bottom line of their companies. We live in a capitalistic society run by corporate profits and essential year over year growth.

I understand why The New York Times and CNN reports the way it does. They are media hacks run by the corporate dollar. Injustice is injustice. Murder is murder. While Palestinian suffering goes on unreported children like Ragheb Al-Masri remain dead and forgotten, and the American press remains biased and forgiven.

Also discussed during the Iran-Syrian talks, was the deteriorating situation in Iraq. The two officials urged foreign ministers of Iraq's neighbours to hold an immediate meeting to discuss ways to help restore security and stability in the war-devastated country.

Al-Shara delivered a message from the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Al Shara's visit follows Nejad's trip to Damascus last January.

• Israel's nukes

Israel continuously refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty , aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons which would endanger global security.

Thus Israel's nuclear sites were never subject to inspections and the threat of sanctions by the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Israel's Atomic Energy Commission was formed in 1952 and began working closely with the Israeli military.

By 1953, according to the BBC, a process for extracting uranium found in the Negev desert was completed and scientists invented a new method of producing heavy water - giving Israel great capability to produce some of the most important nuclear materials.

Israel sought and received the assistance of France.

According to Washington-based website GlobalSecurity.org, a secret agreement between the two states resulted in the construction of the Dimona plant in the late 1950s.

U.S. inspectors visited Israel's Dimona reactor several times in 1960s, however, they failed to obtain an accurate picture of the activities going on there, due to the fact that, according to GlobalSecurity.org, Israelis installed false control room panels and brick over elevators and hallways that accessed certain areas of the facility.

However, inspectors were able to report that they saw no scientific research or civilian nuclear power programme that could justify such a huger reactor.

A U.S. Central Intelligence Agency report in 1968 found that Israel had begun to produce nuclear weapons.

According to Israel's Information Centre for Human Rights, the separation barrier will negatively affect around half a million Palestinians. More than 14 Palestinian towns and villages, with more than 24,000 Palestinians, will be cut off by the wall from the rest of the West Bank. The wall will also surround 53 towns and villages, inhabited by at least 230,000 Palestinians, and isolate 18 Palestinian towns and villages in East Jerusalem, where 220,000 Palestinians live.

In the agriculture-dependent Palestinian territories, surrounded by Jewish settlements, the lack of resources causes massive losses for Palestinian farmers, while pollution and inadequate water disposal create manifold sanitation and health problems.

A recent UN report on the humanitarian impacts of the illegal barrier stated that the wall is hurting Palestinian farmers, who are banned by Israel from reaching farmland. The report also warned that the Palestinian agriculture land may eventually be confiscated by Israel if not cultivated. UN official Allegra Pacheco says the illegal barrier is causing a gruesome economic impact on the Palestinians who live close to it. "Our biggest concern is that farmers are increasingly not being allowed access to their farmland," she said.

According to an article on AFP, Israel controls about 75 percent of the Palestinian water resources in the northern West Bank, where rainfall is rare and water is a strategic asset. "The route of the wall matches that of water resources, the latter being conveniently located on the Israeli side," said Elisabeth Sime, director of aid organization CARE International, in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

While agriculture makes up almost a third of Palestinian gross domestic product, only five percent of Palestinian land is irrigated. On the other hand, 70 percent of Israeli and Jewish settlement land is watered, even if agriculture accounts for only two percent of Israeli GDP.

In the northern West Bank town of Nazlet Isa, Israel's giant network of fences and concrete barricades has left six homes stranded on the Israeli side along with the rich underground aquifer. Although the Israeli government allowed a special system of pipes to access the water, immediate access and control still lies in its hands.

Abdul Rahman Tamimi, director of the non-governmental Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG), said that Israel deliberately designed the route of the barrier to siphon off with the region's aquifers. "The wall cuts some communities off from their only source of water, prevents tanker trucks from getting around and puts up prices," he said.

Tamimi, moreover, said that at least 20 wells, or 30 percent of water resources in the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya, were lost because of the wall. "The fact that Israel confiscates and overexploits water affects every sector of Palestinian economic life and causes problems for the chances of development in the region and therefore chances of peace," he said.

According to Palestinian officials, more than 320,000 Palestinians living in the West Bank are not connected to mains water. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are therefore forced to buy water from trucks, an expense many cannot afford, to supplement local supplies that often fall short of demands.

"I can't go on like this. My land is parched and I'm ruined," says 76-year-old Nazmi Abdul Ghani, who buys expensive water tankers to irrigate his lands in the northern West Bank village of Saida. "The Israelis stole our land and took our water," he added.

Three leading medical organizations, Medicins du Monde, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, said that the barrier is preventing the access of 10,000 chronically ill Palestinians to hospitals, and that it can also affect more than 100,000 pregnant Palestinian women who are denied access to healthcare.

"The wall has put Palestinian healthcare at risk, both for patients and medical staff that have difficulties accessing or are denied access to hospitals," said Medicins Du Monde president Francois Jeanson.

Ruchama Marton, a psychiatrist who heads Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, also stressed the negative psychological impact of the barrier on both Israelis and Palestinians.

Moreover, about a third of the local drinking water in the West Bank is contaminated by sewage and pesticides, creating some chronic health problems for Palestinian residents.

"The quality of water is getting worse and worse," said CARE's Sime. "A high proportion of new-born babies die of water-born infections. In the long run, Israelis will be affected by the pollution of water in the Palestinian territories."

According to Dr Hossam Madi, most Palestinian children suffer from darrhoea, gastroenteritis, fever, kidney failure, infection and dermatological problems. These diseases can also infect Palestinian adults because of poor water supplies.

"I often get stomach ache. I throw up. It's the same for all the children here," nine-year-old Fatima said.

The waste of Israeli settlers is another problem. In small West Bank villages, such as Jalbun, household, agricultural and industrial waste from Israeli settlements speed up the process of water pollution.

Moreover, some Israeli businessmen and settlers dump toxic waste on Palestinian land in an act of "environmental terrorism", Tamimi says.

The Israeli government defied the international community and a 2004 World Court ruling when it decided to go ahead with the construction of the barrier which poses a humanitarian catastrophe that creates a population of prisoners in their own land.

It seems that Israel is doing everything in its power to prevent a Palestinian state from emerging, and will continue to do so as long as it depends on its powerful allies and an abundant popular indifference.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.

Although the United States and Britain aggressively sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq - which they failed to obtain - the president said repeatedly that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.

Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Those proposals were first reported last month in the British press, but the memo does not make clear whether they reflected Mr. Bush's extemporaneous suggestions, or were elements of the government's plan.

Consistent Remarks

Two senior British officials confirmed the authenticity of the memo, but declined to talk further about it, citing Britain's Official Secrets Act, which made it illegal to divulge classified information. But one of them said, "In all of this discussion during the run-up to the Iraq war, it is obvious that viewing a snapshot at a certain point in time gives only a partial view of the decision-making process."

On Sunday, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said the president's public comments were consistent with his private remarks made to Mr. Blair. "While the use of force was a last option, we recognized that it might be necessary and were planning accordingly," Mr. Jones said.

"The public record at the time, including numerous statements by the President, makes clear that the administration was continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution into 2003," he said. "Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to comply, but he chose continued defiance, even after being given one final opportunity to comply or face serious consequences. Our public and private comments are fully consistent."

The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.