17/01/2005 Isreal/Palestine-Abu Dis, The Separation Wall . . Palestinian continue their daily life , living along the wall. On June 16, 2002 Israel began unilaterally building its "separation Wall" (hafrada wall) in the Occupied West Bank. .The main wall, according to approved plans by Israel on October 2003, will be 381 km in length and supplemented by 169km of a secondary fence, affecting some 943, 000 dunams of land. At a cost of $2.7 million per kilometer, the construction costs alone are over one billion U.S. dollars. This does not take into consideration the costs of Palestinian property confiscated and/or destroyed. The wall is an eight-meter high concrete barrier in some areas of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in others it is a three-meter high electrified fence with additional barriers on either side constructed of razor wire, trenches and military roads. Where it is a wall or a fence, it ranges from 30m to 100m in width with the multiple surveillance systems..In order to build the wall, Palestinian land is being confiscated for the wall itself and for the large buffer zones surrounding it. Palestinians have been separated from their places of employment, their farmlands, hospitals, schools, places of worship and their families. In the first phase of the wall alone, 100,000 trees have been uprooted; 35,000 meters of irrigation networks have been destroyed; and 75% of teachers and students living in the construction areas have had difficulty arriving at school.PHOTO:ALFRED