The Side of Palestine the Media Doesn’t Show You 🇵🇸

Part of Harry’s West Bank cycling series. He rides roughly 27 km from Bethlehem to Hebron in Palestine — overloaded backpack, punctured spare, hills he curses the whole way — after locals warn him about the road and about settlers throwing rocks. Along the way he passes the invisible 1949 Green Line, explains the Oslo Accords’ A/B/C zones, and slips through one of the West Bank’s many traffic-control gates by bike. In Hebron he crosses the checkpoint into H2: the Ibrahimi Mosque split 60/40 into synagogue and mosque since the 1994 massacre, the ghost town of Shuhada Street, the caged-over market street where settlers above throw rubbish and urine bottles onto Palestinians below, a 120-year-old sweets shop, and a rooftop tour from a homeowner who says his family refused a fortune for their house and paid dearly for it. The day ends unplanned: a Palestinian subscriber’s family takes the stranger with a camera in for tea within five minutes.

Itinerary

Bethlehem (breakfast, farewells) → highway hills past an Israeli settlement → a controlled gate → Hebron H1 (lunch, hotel) → checkpoint into H2 → Ibrahimi Mosque → Shuhada Street → old-city market → a subscriber’s family home in a village.

Key moments

• [00:00] The premise: Hebron is the only city where Israeli settlers live in the middle of a Palestinian city, guarded by soldiers.
• [07:02] The Green Line — the 1949 armistice border, on Google Maps but meaningless on the ground; olive trees as Palestine’s sacred economic lifeline, and settlers burning them as harassment.
• [09:59] Village kids and roadside strangers keep stopping him with water and welcomes — Harry’s riff on why every travel vlogger raves about Arab hospitality (in five days in Tel Aviv no stranger approached him; here it’s everyone).
• [17:51] A West Bank gate: traffic control that would force a long detour by car; his bike squeezes through.
• [19:40] First impressions of Hebron: clean streets, drive-thru café, and the same warmth everyone warned him he wouldn’t find.
• [21:57] The Oslo Accords explained: Area A (Palestinian cities), B (shared), C (about 60% of the land, Israeli control, building permits effectively unobtainable); Hebron further split into H1 (Palestinian) and H2 (Israeli military).
• [24:03] Fresh hand-pressed orange juice for 5 shekels in the old city.
• [27:00] Through the checkpoint into the Ibrahimi Mosque, burial place of Abraham and holy to both faiths — physically split 60% synagogue, 40% mosque after the 1994 massacre of praying Muslims; having visited the mosque, Harry is barred from the synagogue side. He notes the IDF treated him politely while being harsh to local Arabs at the same crossing.
• [28:45] Shuhada Street, once Hebron’s beating heart, now a ghost town — restrictions imposed after the 1994 massacre grew until the former residents themselves were excluded.
• [35:48] A shopkeeper whose family shop by the mosque was closed as a “military zone” after October 2023: “we need you to talk about the reality… don’t forget us.” Handmade keffiyehs at 40 shekels; he presses extras on Harry as thanks for coming.
• [42:11] The caged market street: netting and barbed wire protect Palestinian stalls below from rubbish and urine bottles thrown from settler homes above.
• [43:21] A 120-year-old family sweets shop — Hebron’s first — serving knafeh from Nablus.
• [44:27] A rooftop tour from a homeowner who wants footage, not money: he says settlers killed three of his brothers in 2007, that two babies died in a Molotov attack on the house, that his father refused enormous sums for it, and that a watchtower with soldiers overlooks the roof; he now houses 15 people and will never sell. (His personal account, as told to Harry.)
• [50:36] A subscriber’s village family hosts Harry for tea and chocolate — his closing point about who actually lives here.

Extracted pages

• Place: Hebron
• Country: Palestine