Photographs ©Olivier Thebaud.

Return on contact sheets.
All this photographs are a comeback into the contact sheets of my three last trip in the Middle East in 2001 and 2002. This distance with the news and the strong desire to return there bring to this new selection a real documentary background. A notebook of things I had sawn and that I would like to assume with also precise and dated captions.
Olivier Thébaud Brittany, 08/ 2005

By the end of 2005 about 100 sq km of occupied Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, and some 200,000 Palestinians, will be surrounded by a nine metre concrete wall.

The 7,000 Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip are supposed to leave or be removed this month, and their settlements destroyed. No one knows yet if it really will happen, given settler resistance and lack of army cooperation.

August 2005

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The construction of settlements in the West Bank, especially in the space between the wall and the Green Line of 1967, is continuing apace. The Central Statistics Bureau published a report a few weeks ago which revealed that construction in he West Bank rose 83% in the first quarter of 2005 (564 homes against 308 in 2004) while construction in the rest of Israel declined by 25%. *(Monde Diplomatique 07-05)