ABU DIS, West Bank - For Palestinian and Israeli medical students Taraji al-Qadi and Yael Oren the journey to lectures at two Jerusalem teaching hospitals is perilous - but for entirely different reasons.

To get to East Jerusalem's Makkased hospital, Qadi has to scale a concrete wall patrolled by Israeli paramilitary police and scramble for an hour by foot up a hill to the facility. The barrier blocks the road to the hospital, a 10-minute drive away.

Across the wall, Oren sits on a bus on a nerve-racking trip to Hadassah hospital. She jolts when the bus lets on passengers, eyeing them to see whether one might be a Palestinian suicide bomber in disguise, hiding a bomb in a bag or under his clothes.

The 3-metre high wall dividing the two students is newly erected by Israel for the declared purpose of preventing suicide bombers - who have killed more than 430 people in three years - from crossing into Israel from the West Bank.

Soon the barrier will be replaced by a permanent wall, 8 metres high, covered by barbed wire with a fenced-off dirt track for soldiers making daily patrols for infiltrators.

It will have all the hallmarks of a border, which Israel has assured its skeptical ally, the United States, it is not.

"They are taking our freedom away," said Qadi, 24. She believes the wall will do little to deter suicide bombers and that the real Israeli motivation is far more nefarious.

"They are taking East Jerusalem away from us," she said, referring to the half of the holy city captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Like many other Palestinians, Qadi wants East Jerusalem for the capital of a future Palestinian state.

'Berlin wall'

Slicing mercilessly through the invisible border between the town of Abu Dis and the sprawling neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, the barrier which Palestinians call the "Berlin Wall" has, like its namesake, already been defaced by graffiti.

"Ghetto Abu Dis" someone has daubed in large Hebrew letters, perhaps a student from the adjacent al-Quds University whose campus will probably be cut in half by the wall - sports grounds on one side and the rest of the university on the other.

At the moment gaping holes in the temporary wall allow Palestinians to climb over to the East Jerusalem side to visit family or sell food at the markets. Groups of children scurry back and forth to get to school.

"Mama, mama," bawled a terrified toddler as a stranger lifted him up and carried him over the wall. He stopped crying when his mother climbed over and grabbed his hand.

Women wearing Islamic headscarves and clutching hand bags - embarrassed by the gaze of onlookers - gingerly scale the crevasses of the wall with help from others waiting their turn.

An old lady with a walking stick peers through at her once local pharmacy. Either she will have take a taxi to the pharmacy, just metres (yards) away. She will have to take a taxi to the pharmacy or the pharmacist will have to come out and sell her medicine through a hole.

The slabs of concrete of the Abu Dis wall are recycled. They were last used to protect Israeli apartments from Palestinian gunmen who occasionally opened fire during a three-year-old Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Colourful pictures painted on the cement blocks by the Israelis whose homes the slabs once protected break up the grey bleakness of the wall and strings of barbed wire haphazardly thrown over it like grotesque streamers.

"This situation causes a lot of absurdity," said Oren, 26. "It absurd that she (Qadi) has to climb over a wall to get to lectures. It's absurd that we can't be friends.

"I can't begin to imagine how difficult the lives of Palestinians are. But the situation is like this - we need to take care of ourselves before we take care of others."

Oren makes her daily bus journey mindful of suicide bombing victims, including a hospital emergency-room director and his adult daughter, killed on the eve of her wedding.

"You can never be sure that you will get on a bus and actually arrive alive at your destination," she said.

Sad and angry

For Palestinians, even a brief trip to school, or work, or a visit to relatives can take hours if there is congestion at a military roadblock or if they are turned back by soldiers.

"When they are bombed I feel sad but when I am at the wall or gate and the soldiers don't let me go to the hospital for my studies, I feel very angry. I cannot tolerate this," said Qadi.

She will probably be eligible for a permit to cross at about five gates due to be built along the new wall to allow selected Palestinians from the West Bank to enter East Jerusalem.

Many Palestinians remember a time when outings to Tel Aviv beaches or the verdant Galilee in northern Israel were possible before 1993 when the army began erecting checkpoints to curtail the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The measures became even harsher after several suicide bombings in 1996, when Israel sealed the frontier with the West Bank for months at a time, preventing tens of thousands of Palestinians from going to work in the Jewish state.

Now Israel's construction of a barrier of walls and fences sends shudders through Palestinians, many of whom have jobs or family living in Israeli-ruled areas on the other side.

"They are turning this into a prison," said one man.

But for Israelis like Oren who say they wish for peace with the Palestinians, the only solution as long as suicide bombings continue and peace negotiations founder is such a barrier.

"I don't hate them," she said, "but the most important thing for me is to ensure that my friends, the people that I know, won't be hurt and unfortunately that comes at a price."

(Agencies via Xinhua)