NABLUS: In the Old City of Nablus, as elsewhere in the West Bank, the Palestinian uprising has simmered down as the kernels of fresh conflict glitter in the embers. On the walls of labyrinthine downtown Nablus, intifada graffiti have begun to fade, pictures of martyrs have started to yellow.

Armed with an assault rifle, Fadi Qafisha, the sender of several Palestinian suicide bombers to Israel, feels secure enough to entertain at home, an apartment which the Israeli army has repeatedly raided to arrest him.

“Our war with Israel is not over. We have simply consented to give them a truce,” said the 28-year-old, a local leader in Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a radical offshoot of the main governing Fatah party.

Armed Palestinian groups have observed a de facto truce since January that has seen a marked reduction if not a complete end to all violence as shown by a weekend spike in the Gaza Strip.

Qafisha’s curriculum vitae during the last five years has left an indelible mark on his flesh: his right hand and left thumb blown away by Israeli mortars, scars criss-crossing his stomach and torso that he is proud to show off.

“During the intifada, we taught an entire generation there is a Jewish occupier that must be ejected from our land,” he said.

But for him, the death of more than 3,700 Palestinians in five years of bloodshed is not too much to pay for a date with freedom.

“They (Israel) retreated from the Gaza Strip and tomorrow they will retreat from the West Bank,” he added.

If there is no visible Israeli presence anywhere in Nablus, the army checkpoint of Hawarah on the city’s southern approach is a constant reminder that occupation lives on in the West Bank.

Each Palestinian and each car is rigorously controlled by helmeted and heavily armed soldiers. Drivers wait interminably to be waved through.

Further south looms the Jewish settlement of Ariel, the largest in the northern West Bank and perhaps Israel’s most controversial, lying so deep and sprawling so wide across the territory.

In the neighbouring Palestinian villages of Iskaka and Marda, work on a section of Israel’s separation barrier is underway, eating up yet more land in the name of stopping militant infiltrations.

For Qafisha, this wall, the settlement and the continued detention of up to 8,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel are ‘the seeds of a new intifada’.

Mohammed Ghazal, one of the main local leaders of Hamas, is similarly convinced that the uprising will resume as a matter of course.

“It will not be long before the situation blows up again,” he said, accusing Israel of continuing to violate the terms of a truce by confiscating land, building the wall and arresting or shooting militants.

Citing Israel’s recent pullout from the Gaza Strip, he said ‘resistance’ was the only way to end the occupation, calling negotiations a total failure.—AFP