Sarah Helm set off by car to see Palestinians in Jenin but soon found that her road map was of no use. In the four decades after the Six-Day War, a labyrinth of walls, unmarked roads and checkpoints has arisen, hiding whole towns from Israeli eyes.

‘Jenin? you want to go to Jenin?’, asked a Palestinian villager, standing near an unmanned Israeli roadblock somewhere in the northern West Bank. The villager scratched his head as if surprised to hear the city’s name, although we could not have been more than five miles away as the crow flies. ‘It’s a problem’, he said.

‘Where exactly is it? Which direction?’ I asked anxiously. Having circled the area for so long, I had lost my bearings. I was last in Jenin - due north of Jerusalem beyond the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Nablus - five years ago to write about a suicide bomber who killed himself and 15 Israelis, including a family of five, in a Jerusalem pizzeria. Back then Jenin was still on the map.

Read more… the ‘invisible’ town.

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