Fred Schlomka
I had an interesting phone call from one of my Palestinian Tour Guides in Nablus today. Apparently when he was showing a group of visitors around the city yesterday the local tourist police approached him and said that in future he was to provide them with all of the tourist’s passport details in advance of a visit. This is going to cause us some headaches, especially since I have a group scheduled to visit Nablus on our weekly Wednesday tour from Jerusalem in a few days.

So I established a secure web page and asked the registered guests to provide their details. It will be interesting to see if this new regulation results in a decline in the number of tourists willing to visit Nablus. I hope not.

In the meanwhile I called several Palestinian colleagues and asked if anything could be done about this new inconvenience. A couple of them said they would contact their ‘connections’ in the Nablus Governate and ask for the regulation to be annulled since it might discourage tourism to the city. More on this later . . . .