Qalandiya

Qalandiya is four things at the same time, and confusing them is easy, so this record separates them.

The village lies 9.6 kilometres north of Jerusalem at 758 metres, bordered by Kafr ‘Aqab to the east, Rafat to the north, al-Judeira to the west and Bir Nabala to the south. The Palestinian census of 2007 counted 1,063 people — 517 male, 546 female — in 214 households. Its village council names the principal families as the ‘Awad Allah, Hussein, Hamad, Hamdiyah and Suboh households, and gives the village’s founding as the Crusader period; the derivation of the name is uncertain, with a local tradition connecting it to a Kurdish tribe once settled there. About 200 people left the village after 2000.

The camp was established in 1949, a year after the Nakba, and is a separate place with a separate population. UNRWA registered 16,344 Palestine refugees there as of 2023, on 0.353 square kilometres at an estimated density of 46,300 per square kilometre — refugees from Jerusalem, Haifa, Lydd, Ramla and the country west of Hebron. Four schools serve around 1,152 pupils; one health centre serves the camp.

The airport was Jerusalem’s, built under the Mandate on land north-east of the village. Israel confiscated 639 dunums of Qalandiya’s land — 19.5 per cent of the village — for what is now the Qalandiya airport military camp, and a further 574 dunums, 17.5 per cent, for the Atarot industrial settlement built to the south-east in 1970. The runway that once connected Jerusalem to the world is a closed military installation.

The checkpoint began as a roadblock in 2001, according to UNRWA, and became the busiest crossing in the West Bank for both people and vehicles. It is the gate between Ramallah and Jerusalem: Jerusalem ID holders queue to enter the city they live in, West Bank ID holders may not pass without a permit that is rarely issued, and the surrounding towns describe it in almost identical language. ARIJ’s ar-Ram profile records the hours of waiting, the traffic, the effect on access to hospitals and schools, and the crossing’s standing as a flashpoint where people have been arrested, shot and killed. UNRWA records a heavy military presence, frequent confrontations, and army operations inside Qalandiya camp — in 2014 two people were killed during such operations, one of them an UNRWA staff member.

The land underneath all of it

Under Oslo II, 3,207 of Qalandiya’s 3,273 dunums — 98 per cent — were classified Area C, where Palestinian building requires a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration; 66 dunums, 2 per cent, were Area B, and that fragment holds most of the village’s people. The barrier, on the route published in April 2007, runs four kilometres across Qalandiya’s land and isolates 1,940 dunums, 59.3 per cent of the village. Bypass roads 45 and 443, built to connect Atarot and the airport camp to Israeli cities inside the 1948 lines, took more, each with a 75-metre buffer zone along its sides.

Qalandiya village is also one of the small enclaves OCHA lists as left outside the barrier but inside the Israeli-declared Jerusalem municipal boundary — a category of roughly 160,000 people whose residency papers entitle them to a city they must queue to enter.

Sources

• Qalandiya Village Profile — Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ)
• Kalandia Camp — UNRWA, camp profile (data for 2023)
• East Jerusalem Palestinian localities behind the Barrier — UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory, 10 August 2016
• Ar Ram & Dahiyat al Bareed Town Profile — Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ), on the Qalandiya crossing