Diary: Return to the West Bank

By Martin Asser BBC News Online, Jerusalem

With the future for Mid-East peace looking bleak, BBC News Online's Martin Asser is keeping a daily diary during his assignment to Israel and the West Bank.

I return to my hotel after Day One to the depressing news of the first conflict-related death since I arrived.

An air strike in Gaza that missed two Hamas leaders - who had apparently seen the Israeli helicopters and ran for it - killed a 64-year-old man on a donkey cart. More than 20 were wounded too.

You do not have to be clairvoyant to know there will probably be plenty more bloodshed, of the innocent and the not-so-innocent, before my week in Jerusalem is up.

Familiar face: Olfat has now moved to Ramallah

But happily it was very quiet all day where I was - in Ramallah, the large West Bank town just north of Jerusalem.

I was chasing after Palestinian political analysts and "real people" as we journalists call them (ie you, the general public) to see what they made of Yasser Arafat's latest political twists and turns.

I was also able to catch up with an acquaintance from my spring 2002 visit, the redoubtable Olfat, whom I accompanied on an exhausting three-hour West Bank odyssey - that was in fact half of her twice-daily commute between an office in Ramallah and home in Nablus.

Olfat is in very good health, made all the better for the fact that last September she decided to move into a flat in Ramallah, so she only performs the odyssey once a week nowadays, for the weekend.

She is particularly happy to have lost 17 kilos in weight since her move.

This surprises me as - not because she does not look much slimmer, she does - but because as I remember, the commute involved a half-hour trek across open hillside to get from about two kilometres (1.2 miles) outside Nablus to the edge of town, avoiding the impossible-to-cross Israeli checkpoint at Hawara.

Surely exercise like that was better than going to the gym!

"Well, what I used to do was eat supper and go straight to sleep, to be up early the next morning," she tells me.

Flashback: West Bank odyssey

She laughs when I reply that I think that is the same regime sumo wrestlers use to pile on the weight - high-calorie food then sleep.

So what finally made Olfat leave her beloved Nablus? Answer: The torrid time she's had almost immediately after I travelled with her.

• The month-long curfew imposed by Israeli army in April 2002
• The unpredictability of travelling the 30 km between Nablus and Ramallah in May, June and July
• The shooting dead of a man on her route in August, whom the Israelis said they had identified as one of their "wanted" Palestinians
• Another long curfew in September

"Even in September I used to come, despite the checkpoints being closed," she says.

"I'd stay in a hotel in Ramallah. But it was costing more than my salary, so I got the flat in October with Azza, my colleague, who's also from Nablus."

Despite the closures? Yes, she said, and she told me how, but made me promise not to publish the expensive and extremely devious way she managed it.

Be prepared: It's never a bad thing to have your dress ready, just in case

After Olfat's office, I went out to do some vox pops and about an hour later walked into the chi-chi Miss Jerusalem Boutique in the centre of town.

Inside, a young woman was being fitted for her wedding dress. To my astonishment I realised it was the very same Azza to whom I had just been introduced at Olfat's office.

"Mabrouk (congratulations)," I said. "When's the big day?"

"We don't have one yet, not until things are calm in Nablus... but it's good to be ready just in case," she says.

A marriage "on hold", just like so many other things in the lives of the people of Ramallah.