The flat roofs and streets are spread out below the Hebron observatory – on a hill above the southern West Bank city’s old town.
Today a group of mainly American tourists has up come to see the view from the observatory, run by Jewish settlers, some hundreds of whom live protected by the Israeli army in the section of the city below known as H2.
They watch enthralled as a pair of Israeli soldiers stroll across one of the roofs to take up a firing position.
Two hundred metres away, and on a higher roof, three Palestinians youths are also visible busy throwing stones with their slingshots at the nearby Israeli checkpoint at the end of al-Shuhada street.
Smoke billows from tyres burning in the market. The sound of stun grenades echoes through the lanes. Teenagers flit among the smoke amid the crack of the firing of plastic-coated rounds.
In the West Bank’s most troubled city and its peripheral villages, these choreographed and familiar clashes are a part of a cycle of violence becoming ever more dangerous.
It is a cycle that has seen Palestinian stabbings and shootings of soldiers and settlers in the recent upsurge of violence that began in early October.
On the other side, Israeli soldiers and police and settlers have shot dead young Palestinians, some of them involved in attacks, others at clashes.
The figures make for stark reading. Between 3 October and 9 November, 70 Palestinians are alleged to have carried out stabbing or car-ramming terror attacks, either in the West Bank or Israel. Forty-three were killed, 24 of whom were residents of Hebron district – 18 lived in the city itself. All of which led some Israeli media last month to dub Hebron “the capital of intifada”.
In the last week or so, the sense of escalation has only grown as Israeli undercover troops and men from the Israeli domestic security agency raided a hospital in the city, shooting dead a relative of a wanted Hamas member on a busy ward.
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