PHOTOGRAPHERS: FRANCISCO SECO: Stories: Going to work: Inside Rachel´s Tomb checkpoint

Every working day, thousands of normal Palestinians - teachers, office staff and health workers – rise well before the crack of dawn, and make their way from their towns and villages in the West Bank to Bethlehem and Israel’s “security wall”. The first few arrive at the Rachel’s Tomb anytime from 3am, and the area is always packed with men and coffee and bread stalls by 5am.

Once the soldiers open the checkpoint – a grim cross between a slaughterhouse and a high-security prison – the exhausted workers are slowly herded through endless metal pens, x-ray machines, ID checks, and fingerprint-checking machines, before boarding buses for the final few miles to the city and their work. It’s a routine that can take anything up to three hours. On a really bad day they are refused permission to pass – and can lose their job as a result.

Inconvenient as this daily humiliation undoubtedly is, these workers are well aware that they are the lucky ones. The disputed Israeli capital may be just 10km from Bethlehem – gateway of the West Bank – but today these two towns are worlds apart. The handful of Palestinians granted Israeli work permits have been carefully security checked. Many more had their permissions revoked for tenuous reasons during the first and second intifadas.

With unemployment in some parts of the West Bank running at 55 per cent and wages considerably higher in Israel, those cleared to work in Jerusalem are left with little real choice. Painfully early rises, hours of queuing and submitting themselves to the whims and bad attitude dished out by the teen soldiers who man the checkpoint are the price they must pay to survive.