Ship of Fools editor, Simon Jenkins, is currently travelling in Israel and Palestine with the Amos Trust, which works for justice, peace and reconciliation in the region. Over the next few days, he'll be updating us with his experience of the situation on the ground in a daily online diary. For previous diary items, go here.

Bethlehem is closed
TUESDAY 29th MAY

We flew into Tel Aviv yesterday, and for our first day we do something that every tourist and pilgrim does: we go to Bethlehem. But Bethlehem is basically closed. In Manger Square, normally a pushing, shoving scrum of people on a hot, cloudless day like today, we find only a few people wandering. Most of the shops are shut. All the hotels are closed. We have a vast choice of parking spaces.

The Palestinian policemen at the door to the Church of the Nativity, who are there to enforce the below-the-knee hemline rule and stop people carrying weapons into church, tell us there are usually two or three thousand pilgrims here every day, but now only five or ten.

Shell holes in the side of the Hotel Paradiso tell the reason why. Across the shepherds' fields outside the town we can see a massive building project – Har Homa, a Jewish settlement which is still months from completion. It looks like a vast and obscene timeshare project in Ibiza, with ugly, heavily-built concrete apartments rising on what was once a beautiful, green hill, which the Israelis have brutally flattened.

Built on what is meant to be Palestinian land, Har Homa's brooding presence is protected by tanks which patrol the access road below. It was a tank which put the holes into the side of the Hotel Paradiso. In the same week, Israeli snipers picked off a man driving his wife and children home after a meal out. The random shelling of Bethlehem and killing of civilians from the direction of the settlement makes every street with a view of Har Homa feel dangerous.

It's hard to get my mind around the fact that shells, rockets, and now F-16s, are being used against ordinary, unarmed people.

"When we see the tanks, we lose our minds," says Zoughbi Zoughbi, who runs a local reconciliation centre with a direct line of sight to Har Homa. "We move to the office at the back, in case they start firing at us."

Sitting with him in his exposed, front office, beneath a beaming picture of Desmond Tutu, he tells us something of the human cost of the Israeli occupation: up to 90 per cent unemployment, stress-related illnesses, a rise in domestic violence and divorce, a tightening grip of fear and anger which is close to exploding.

Leaving Zoughbi, we drive out of town and stop in a road with spacious, pleasant houses on either side. We are here to meet Joseph, a carpenter from Bethlehem. Like his namesake from the Christmas story, Joseph's family are Bethlehem people. His family and his brother's lived in the house here for 24 years. Until last October.

Four hundred metres away is the Israeli military camp which drove Joseph and his family away. We see a high mound, a forbidding wall and the flag of Israel fluttering above it. Eight months ago, the soldiers started taking pot shots at the local Palestinian houses. Joseph's was in the front line, at point-blank range.

In October, Joseph moved his family out, the children terrified and confused by the shelling. In April, the whole back of the house simply folded under the bombardment.

Joseph shows us inside. The front of the house, away from the camp, is perfectly preserved, with marble floors and a showroom kitchen. At the back is chaos. A Christmas tree lies in the rubble. "This year the tree was decorated with shrapnel," says Wisam, our tour guide.

Standing with Joseph in the rubble that was his home for so many years, I ask him how he feels. He finds the words: "Not angry... heartbroken. When my kid comes back here to find his toys, what do I say to him? I can't explain to a five-year-old who asks, 'why did they burn my bed?' How do I explain to him?

"We don't want our children to feel bad inside in the future towards the children of the Israelis – or for them to feel bad towards our kids. We want to live in peace. We pray for the kids of the Israelis, and for the Israelis."