QALQILYA, WEST BANK -- Here on the edge of the West Bank, in a city almost entirely encircled by Israel's security barrier, a tall, sandy-haired South African is pining for a mate.

Ruti the giraffe is one of the star attractions at the West Bank's only zoo, a struggling but well-kept operation that has been a source of delight to Palestinian children for 20 years.

But Ruti's existence is a lonely one, with most days spent roaming around her enclosure and dipping her head to bat her eyes at the zoo's few visitors. Once, she had a partner, an equally striking giraffe called Brownie with whom she'd conceived a son.

But the peace and relative prosperity of the zoo in the late 1990s, when groups came from around the West Bank and even Israelis would venture in to pay the five-shekel ($1.30) entry fee, gave way to the intifada in 2000. The number of visitors dropped off, employees had to work under curfew, three zebras perished after tear gas was fired near their enclosure. And in 2002, during an Israeli incursion into the city, soldiers fired at demonstrating students from a nearby high school, and Brownie, terrified and galloping around his enclosure, ran straight into a metal pole. He fell over and died, leaving Ruti alone.

The problems did not stop there. "The female became so sad at losing her partner that she stopped eating," said Sami Khader, the zoo's veterinarian. Two weeks later, their baby giraffe was stillborn two months prematurely.

Four years later, the zoo still cannot find a mate for Ruti, now middle-aged at 13. Her loneliness is part politics, part economics: A new giraffe would cost tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and transport, money the cash-strapped zoo would have difficulty raising. Most of its visitors now come from Qalqilya and the immediate area, since travel restrictions prevent many West Bank residents from getting here. The zoo has gone from a modestly profitable venture taking in 2.5-million shekels ($660,000) annually to a money-losing operation that takes in just 130,000 shekels ($34,000) a year.

There's another problem: Import and export laws for exotic animals have grown tighter, and, given the added procedures of getting an animal into an Israeli port and cleared for release to the West Bank, the zoo must now rely on Israeli zoos and safaris. But convincing Israeli zoos to deal with a West Bank counterpart, in a town where the municipal council is run by Hamas, is also not an easy matter.

"During the years, there was always good co-operation between the zoos. But today it's not so easy from a political point of view. There are problems and for me to convince today a zoo in Israel to donate an animal to a zoo in the West Bank is not so easy," said Motke Levison, the Israeli vet who helped found the zoo and still visits and provides advice.

So Ruti remains alone, though Brownie is still very much on display -- a few hundred metres away inside the Qalqilya Scientific Museum, where Dr. Khader, also a taxidermist, has stuffed him. The cuts on his underbelly are still visible, his lips are pulled back over his teeth, but he towers majestically over the other animals who have fallen victim to tear gas, fright and illness: monkeys, zebras, mountain deer, a hyena and an ostrich among them. Ruti and Brownie's dead son, preserved after he was delivered, is there, too.

Among the zoo's other lonely hearts are a four-tonne hippopotamus named Dobi, which specializes in showing off his enormous incisors, and a bear named Ramu, whose primary pleasure now is eating past-dated chocolates and cookies supplied by zoo staff. Three castrated lions donated by an Israeli safari several years ago, now lazing about on a concrete block and licking each other contentedly, are the only ones who seem unconcerned by their somewhat cramped surroundings.

"They [Israeli zoos] keep saying, 'We will give you better animals if the housing improves.' In their opinion, this is not acceptable housing. They consider this a prison," said Said Daoud, the zoo's manager, of their efforts to obtain new animals.

But zoo officials, struggling on a limited budget, are making an effort. They've built the zoology museum and a small botanical garden, and are now working on a small agricultural museum. The swimming pool inside still operates every summer, and a shiny new playground -- courtesy of the municipal council and Bill and Melinda Gates -- sits waiting to be used.

And Dr. Khader and Mr. Daoud proudly show a project to build a dozen or so new, larger enclosures for the exotic animals already in their possession and the ones they hope to obtain. Among their dreams, besides a mate for Ruti, is an elephant, and a pair of lions for breeding, since their present lions have neither manes nor roar.

"Palestinians are so demoralized they don't even come to the zoo. In Israel, a zoo is a happy place," Dr. Khader said. "We are on the edge of survival here."

Bell Globemedia © Copyright 2006 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.