For days earlier this month, many of the young men of Nur Shams refugee camp on the outskirts of the town of Tulkarm in the occupied West Bank were engaged in a potentially lethal race against time.
Scaling precarious ladders, they stretched between rooftops vast plastic sheets used in more peaceful times to collect the olive harvest. Soon, hundreds of metres of winding lanes were in deep shadow, the sun and the sky obscured. The hill behind the buildings, from which you can see the Mediterranean less than 20km away, was no longer visible.
