Palestinians at an Israeli checkpoint We left the Jerusalem guest house early in the morning, leaving plenty of time to get to the refugee camp near Hebron. At the edge of the city, we zipped through a checkpoint - due mainly to the fact that our driver, a Christian Palestinian, had a "blue card". This allows access to the roads in the West Bank that are otherwise reserved for Israelis.

These roads cutting through the West Bank have fences on each side to make sure Palestinians don't drive on them. In some cases they cut through villages, dividing families and separating children from their schools and farmers from their fields. The whole West Bank is criss-crossed with these roads, built on occupied territory in the name of Israeli security.

We noted, as we drove on this Israelis-only road, a number of new settlement "outposts", makeshift trailers that would eventually give way to full-blown settlements for people who are given financial inducement to settle here - mainly Jews from America and Europe, settling on land taken from Palestinians whose families have lived here for generations, in some cases stretching back to the seventh century.

When we got to the dirt road where we needed to turn into the refugee camp, our driver stopped, both because there were soldiers there and because the way was blocked by a coil of barbed wire stretched across the road. The soldiers asked for our passports as well as our driver's blue card and came over to match our faces to the pictures. Our driver asked the soldiers for permission to move the barbed wire so we could visit the refugee camp. They obliged, which he said was rather miraculous, as they usually said no.

We drove down the main road of the camp, through the ramshackle collection of makeshift buildings the refugees call home, and stopped opposite a school with the International Christian Committee (ICC) sign above it. This school, a fairly new structure, was spotless - spotless enough to win the approval of any Dutch housewife. Clearly, these people take pride in the place they call home.

In the office of the school, we were greeted by two Muslim women. One was from a Bedouin family, originally from the area near the biblical Beersheba (which she was no longer allowed to visit). She directs women's work, teaching refugees sewing and other craft-making skills. The other was the principal of the kindergarten and computer training school. Both were employees of the ICC, which had also supplied the equipment for the school.

The young woman from Beersheba was pregnant with her second child. Doug Fromm asked if there was proper medical care in the camp to help her in her delivery. "No," she said, "only midwives."

"What if there is a problem with the delivery?" he asked. "Would you be able to get to a hospital?"

"No," she said, "the nearest hospital is in Bethlehem. We aren't allowed to go to Bethlehem." (Without checkpoints and the Israeli matrix of control, Bethlehem would only be a ten-minute drive away.)

"So what will happen if there is a problem?" asked Doug.

"The baby will die," she said, "as many have."

Some Palestinian women in this condition have tried to walk through the checkpoints to Bethlehem. In most cases they don't make it.

The other woman spoke about Israeli soldiers pounding on her door late the night before, shouting at her to open up. "My children were terrified," she said. The soldiers had threatened her as they looked for something they never explained to her.

"Why did they do this?" I asked.

"No reason," she said. "They just do it."

"How often does this happen?" I asked.

"Often," she said. "But what can we do? They have guns. They will kill us if we resist."

After drinking the obligatory cup of coffee we made our way to a classroom, where the children treated us to a song. It was heartbreaking to look at their faces, the smiles you would normally see in a kindergarten class sadly absent. Shell-shocked is how they looked. No wonder, given their circumstances.

We left the centre later than planned; we had another appointment to get to in Jerusalem. When we got to the barbed wire coil blocking the road on the way out, our driver got out to move it. That's when it happened.

From a "pillbox" that looked like a miniature grain silo a disembodied voice boomed out over a loudspeaker, "Stop!" (At least that's what I assumed it said. It spoke in Hebrew.)

Our driver stood below the pillbox and told The Voice (as we later learned) that we had been given permission to enter the camp and now wanted to leave. It turns out that the soldier who had allowed us in was now off duty. This was someone new.

The Voice insisted that the driver get our passports. Our driver held them up for The Voice to see. Now the shouting got louder and louder, with the kind of threatening tone you really don't want to hear at a military checkpoint. Our driver came back saying that The Voice had told him that we weren't allowed to use the road.

When he told The Voice we were visitors from America, he replied, "I don't care who they are. If they want to visit the refugee camp, they can just stay there!" And this from a man whose weapons and way of life are courtesy of our [US] taxes.

Our driver asked if he could see the unit commander, standing his ground to let The Voice know that he wasn't going to budge. A military jeep arrived (at which point I put my camera away).

Four young men, eighteen or nineteen years old, got out, putting on their helmets and holding their guns in a ready-to-fire position. Two came over to see us, asking again to see our passports and our driver's ID card. We all obliged - what else could we do? After a few more moments in which it seemed the situation could go either way, one of them waved us on, saying "Have a good day!"

In this short moment we got a taste, only a small taste, of what West Bank Palestinians go through every day, humiliated and threatened by young soldiers at checkpoints and voices in pillboxes.

Is there a note of bitterness in this instalment of my weblog? Yes. Bitterness and sadness. It's hard to respond any other way.

John Hubers