By the time Ibrahim took over the Interior Ministry branch in a-Ram, the wall had reshaped the lives of the Palestinians living on both sides of it, including his own family. The more than 100,000 people in the areas of Shuafat Camp and Kufr Aqab, who had previously received services from Jerusalem, were left without local ambulances, fire trucks, and police. There wasn’t a single ATM in Shuafat Camp and its adjacent neighborhoods. Only Israel’s army and Border Police entered them regularly, usually in armored vehicles, carrying assault rifles, and wearing helmets and body armor.
These enclaves became a haven for fugitives fleeing the authorities. Criminal families of ’48 Palestinians moved into Dahiyat a-Salaam. Murders in the area went unsolved. An ex-head of the Jerusalem district police said of the precincts beyond the wall, “We have no need for them …. The Israeli police doesn’t go in there.” In one incident, an armed gang entered a school in Kufr Aqab, threatening the staff for several hours. Parents begged Israeli police to come, but they didn’t.
The chaos spilled over to nearby communities like a-Ram and Anata, which were also, like municipal Jerusalem, off-limits to PA security forces. Ibrahim wasn’t allowed to bring in Palestinian police and fire trucks without Israel’s permission. To arrest a criminal, he would typically have to wait for three or more days for Israeli approval. For anything urgent, such as stopping a feud, permission was usually granted after several hours.
The problems in the area mounted as the population ballooned. Palestinians with blue IDs who couldn’t afford rent on the Jerusalem side of the wall moved into the crowded neighborhoods just beyond it. That was the only way they could keep their blue IDs. Shoddily built apartment towers sprung up to accommodate the influx. The infrastructure was collapsing. Power outages were frequent. The area was so neglected that Israel didn’t know how many people were living there.
An illicit economy developed around the wall. Israelis sold expired goods to businesses on the other side. Cheap Palestinian products that didn’t meet health and environmental standards went in the opposite direction. Drugs passed through small holes drilled into the barrier. Hazardous waste from Israel was dumped in Palestinian areas. Thousands of old, unsafe cars without registration were sold to Palestinians behind the wall, where neither the PA nor Israel checked their licenses.
In and around Shuafat Camp, parents took their children out of the schools in Jerusalem, afraid to put them in daily contact with soldiers at the checkpoint. There was only one city school on their side of the wall, in a former goat pen. The shortage of classrooms—more than two thousand were lacking in East Jerusalem—was so bad that pupils were forced to study in shifts. There were children at the city schools who still couldn’t read at age nine. More than a third of the Palestinian students in Jerusalem dropped out before the end of high school.
There were UNRWA schools that served Shuafat Camp, but they were awful, too. Some of the teenagers were taking drugs. The most popular was “Nice”: marijuana, tobacco, or other herbs covered in chemicals—pesticides, acetone, ether, rat poison—that gave off a high. From there the kids moved on to heroin, which was sold openly in the streets of the camp. The addicts were getting younger and younger, and so were the teens hospitalized for overdoses.
Parents who could afford it put their children in private schools, which were largely unregulated. In February 2012, one such school, Nour al-Houda, hired a bus company to take its kindergarten class to a play area in Kufr Aqab. The company sent an illegally registered twenty-seven-year-old bus to drive on neglected, congested roads, without proper lighting, a police presence, or a barrier between the lanes of oncoming traffic.