Reporters on the Job

• No Way In: Staff writer Ilene Prusher discovered that she was also subject to the new restrictions – the new walls – encircling Palestinians living in Jerusalem.

"When we tried to get in the gate at the village of Nuaman/Mazmuriya to talk to the woman in the lead of the story, the Israeli soldiers didn't give much credence to our Israeli government-issued press cards. They told me no one but people whose ID show that they live there could enter," says Ilene.

Ilene called the woman who lived in Nuaman on the phone. She told Ilene to take a back way into the community, through a new Jewish neighborhood under construction in East Jerusalem. "We drove around on unpaved roads for about half an hour until we wound up next to an Israeli army shooting range. We kept calling this young woman to redirect us, and finally we wound up on the right dirt road, drove up a hill, and eventually we got to her house," she says.

From the house, "we had a view of the entire city, a city that her village is a part of – yet isn't. Now she's not legally allowed to enter the rest of the city because she doesn't hold a Jerusalem identification card. Her solution seemed to be: get married and get out. But as you'll see in the story, her suitors have the same problem that we had in trying to see her."

David Clark Scott
World editor