![]() Settler violence had already increased in the nine months preceding Hamas’s attack, while in the same time period 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces – already the highest number since the UN began keeping records in 2005. The expansion of outposts has been accompanied by a rise in “settler violence”, which encapsulates everything from torching cars and houses to beatings and driving people out of their homes at gunpoint. “What the army is doing, in seeking to prevent an explosion, is basically creating economic conditions that are very suitable to explosion,” said Shikaki.Īt the same time, Israeli settlers have seized the opportunity, under the cover of war, to establish more illegal outposts throughout the West Bank, building new roads to connect them to existing settlements. Men idly stand on pavements, smoking cigarettes. Shop after shop is shuttered as midday approaches. Just a drive through Ramallah, in heavy traffic, reveals the scale of the crisis. These have not only further limited the movement of Palestinians, but have damaged the West Bank’s economy, hindering trade and production, while also preventing many Palestinians from going to work 170,000 labourers have been barred from entering Israel.īy the end of 2023, unemployment in the West Bank had hit 29 per cent, according to the World Bank. In addition to the 600 security checkpoints that already existed in the West Bank, 100 new barriers – so-called iron gates – have been erected. The authorities have increased the number of roadblocks for Palestinians, in many cases barring them completely from accessing main roads. While most attention has been on Israel’s ferocious offensive in Gaza, over the past five months Israeli security forces have also been extending their presence here in the West Bank. The conditions for a third intifada are being created.” “The use of main roads throughout the entire West Bank is probably 15 per cent of what it used to be ,” Khalil Shikaki, a professor of political science and director of the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, said quietly as we sat at a table in his office in central Ramallah one recent morning. ![]() Yet for Palestinians, moving around the West Bank has become even more difficult since Hamas’s brutal attack on 7 October, as the Israeli military tightens its control over the occupied territory. ![]() In a region where roadblocks and military checkpoints bring traffic to a grinding standstill, the opportunity to move forward must be taken. When motorists travelling on the Begin Boulevard, the roughly ten-mile stretch of highway that runs north of Jerusalem to the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, see an opening in the oppressive gridlock, they take it with urgency.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |