It all looked different here once. Some 7,500 Israeli cars used to come here every Saturday, two or three people in each car, and their passengers left behind some NIS 450 million a year. In addition to that were purchases by building contractors and wholesalers. The economic consultancy firm Czamanski Ben Shahar and Co., which advised the big Israeli shopping malls at the time, prepared a survey of the Biddya market: it had 26,500 square meters of commercial space, triple the size of Ayalon Mall in Ramat Gan and double the size of the Ramat Aviv Mall (in terms of the "non-food" establishments ). The average purchase of each Israeli family that came to this village was estimated at NIS 750, and consequently Israeli furniture and other chains reported a severe blow to their business.

A living-room sofa could be picked up here for NIS 1,000-2,000, and you could place the order in the morning and take it home by the evening. In the village's furniture stores you could also browse through catalogs of international design companies and ask for a perfect imitation, also for NIS 1,000-2,000, depending on your bargaining skills (but not including warranty coverage for the sofa legs ).

TheMarker reported in September 2000: "Biddya is not the end of the story, but only the beginning. Five shopping centers and six industrial zones are to be built in the Palestinian Authority, at the Karni checkpoint in Gaza, in Tul Karm, in Jenin, in Bethlehem, and in Ramallah .... The same way that Israelis pop over to shop in Biddya, they will be able to come from Jerusalem to Ramallah."

A short while after that article ran, the second intifada broke out, in the wake of which the separation fence went up, and the Trans-Samaria Highway was paved along a route that bypassed Biddya. One resident, Sabah Der-Ahmed, described the change this week dryly: "We got up one morning, and there were no Israelis and no road." That was after a stabbing attack in the Biddya shuk.

This week the Palestinian town was sleepy, remote and forgotten. Gone are the traffic jams and the shoppers, gone are the furniture and the imitations. There are no longer any Israeli cars, the large commercial spaces are gone and all that's left are countless shuttered stores. Only a few "light-industry" workshops, carpentry and car repair shops remain to remind us what used to be in Biddya. Here and there are signs in fading Hebrew - "Hirbawi Mattresses," or "All Varieties of Marble, Lokal and Italian," with spelling mistakes.

Anyone who could move someplace else has done so. Now Biddya is a village like all Palestinian villages, some of whose residents sit around every day at the entrances to the handful of local grocery stores, doing nothing and staring at the few cars that cross the dead-end roads.

"We used to travel from here to work every day, straight through all the way to Petah Tikva," whispers a villager named Yousef Abu-Sofia as we stand in front of the barrier that killed his bustling business - a sophisticated electronic fence that was erected at the edge of the shopping street that leads into the adjacent village, Mas'ha. This is the separation fence, which turned the long street into a road with no exit to the west from Biddya, with its approximately 20,000 residents.

Nobody leaves and nobody enters through the closed yellow iron gate in the fence. Only a yellow Chabad flag flying on the other side of the gate, on one of the houses in the nearby settlement of Elkana, still promises that despite everything, the "Messiah king" will come.

We left our car next to Abu-Sofia's stone sawmill on the outskirts of Biddya. Earlier in the week, distraught, he had telephoned Bassem Eid, the executive director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. A great panic had taken hold of Biddya's residents, with reports that Israel intends to expropriate their land and build another settlement on them.

The rumor spread quickly. When we got to the village in the afternoon, representatives of the agitated inhabitants were waiting for us. They invited us to get into Mohammed Salah's old Ford Transit. Along the way we picked up several more residents, and we all traveled together to the village's agricultural land, its final source of income.

The major building boom of the settlements throughout the area that surrounds them is coming to a head now. On the property of the nearby village A-Dik, the Leshem settlement is going up, a big neighborhood of two-story houses, an expansion of the community of Alei Zahav, under the slogan: "Leshem: A place of your own."

On the land of Mas'ha, a neighborhood of large gray edifices is under construction, an expansion of the settlement of Etz Efraim.

"When the bulldozers arrive, it will already be too late," Sabah Der-Ahmed told us. The last time that Israel tried sending the bulldozers in to expropriate this land, his father, Ibrahim, tried to block them with his body and was shot to death by the soldiers, in front of his son.

That was almost 30 years ago. Israel eventually gave up on its plans at the time, after a protracted legal battle in which the residents presented deeds to the land in court. Since that time no land has been expropriated here for construction of new settlements, but rather only for the purpose of paving the Trans-Samaria Highway, which cuts through Biddya.

Sabah is now in his 50s, nearly the age at which his father died. He remembers every detail of the day the soldiers killed his father, after which he was held in custody for two months. Now he says: "I too am willing to die for this land, just like my father."

To reach Biddya's farmland you have to drive along a rocky path until you come to a narrow and dark tunnel, the width of one car, that runs under the highway. South of that road, three or four kilometers of unpaved farm road cut through ancient olive groves, some of them centuries old. The rocky terrain has been worked and cleared. Partridges and their chicks in the dozens scurried about there this week. Some of the trees are stained white, evidence that wild boar came looking for worms under the olive trees.

The surrounding uncultivated fields have yellowed already. Several families were sitting in the shade of the olive trees, smoking narghiles and listening to music. Here and there sat an old Subaru belonging to one of the farmers, who perhaps used to be a furniture salesman once upon a time. After the big mall closed and residents were also prohibited from working in Israel, Biddya had no sources of income remaining aside from these olive trees.

After last year which was tough in terms of the harvest: The passengers in the Transit proudly showed us the tiny olives that had sprouted from the blossoms on the trees, assuring us that come October they would be ripe.

There are some 3,500 dunams (875 acres ) of olive groves on the hills south of the Trans-Samaria Highway - plots of several dozen dunams per family, whose sons come here to work their land. There is no irrigation.

Abu-Sofia whips out several yellowing photographs, depicting olive stumps that were cut down once by settlers. His friend Der-Ahmed pulls out of his plastic bag the documents found last week beneath stones, among the trees, issued by officials in the Israel Defense Forces, the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria, the Custodian of Government Property, the Central Monitoring Unit. Eviction notices, each declaring: "By the power vested in me by the order regarding government property and by the law for safeguarding state lands, I hereby state that you are in illegal possession of the land herein described."

The documents do not specify which land. Nobody bothered to fill in the blanks on the forms, other than two blurred lines in illegible handwriting. To the forms were attached two blurry aerial photographs. Recently the villagers say they also heard that Israel's minister of transportation intends to build a railroad track through here, likewise on their land.

Bulldozers already arrived here last week, and razed several tin shacks that belonged to shepherds from the nearby village of Rafat, who paid rent to live with their livestock on Biddya's property. The remains of the shacks now roll around the hills in the wind, and their occupants, the members of five families with children, have moved to another hill. Twice they had their shacks destroyed; the second time the Civil Administration people threatened that if they rebuilt them again, their livestock would be confiscated.

The whole coastal plane is visible to the west, and airplanes making their way to land at Ben-Gurion International Airport pass over our heads noisily at low altitude. It is grape-leaf picking season now and the village women gather them from the vines growing between the olive trees. There are several ancient fig trees and an almond tree here as well. All of this beauty fails to soothe the residents of Biddya.

"If the bulldozers come - we're screwed. By then it will be too late," Der-Ahmed said again, standing in his little olive patch.

A spokesman for the Civil Administration told Haaretz this week: "On the basis of the information received from the reporter, it is not possible to confirm the details and the claims."