Father Bashar Basiel moved freely in and out of his parish in the occupied West Bank until Israeli troops installed gates at the entrance of his village Taybeh overnight, just hours after a ceasefire began in Gaza.”We woke up and we were surprised to see that we have the iron gates in our entrance of Taybeh, on the roads that are going to Jericho, to Jerusalem, to Nablus,” said Basiel, a Catholic priest in the Christian village north of Ramallah.All over the West Bank, commuters have been finding that their journey to work takes much longer since the Gaza ceasefire started.”We have not lived such a difficult situation (in terms of movement) since the Second Intifada,” Basiel told AFP in reference to a Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s.He said he was used to the checkpoints, which are dotted along the separation barrier that cuts through much of the West Bank and at the entrances to Palestinian towns and cities. But while waiting times got longer in the aftermath of the October 2023 Hamas attack that sparked the Gaza war, now it has become almost impossible to move between cities and villages in the West Bank.- Concrete blocks, metal gates -Left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Israeli authorities ordered the military to operate dozens of checkpoints around the West Bank during the first 42 days of the ceasefire.According to the Palestinian Wall Resistance Commission, 146 iron gates were erected around the West Bank after the Gaza war began, 17 of them in January alone, bringing the total number of roadblocks in the Palestinian territory to 898.”Checkpoints are still checkpoints, but the difference now is that they’ve enclosed us with gates. That’s the big change,” said Anas Ahmad, who found himself stuck in traffic for hours on his way home after a usually open road near the university town of Birzeit was closed.Hundreds of drivers were left idling on the road out of the city as they waited for the Israeli soldiers to allow them through.The orange metal gates Ahmad was referring to are a lighter version of full checkpoints, which usually feature a gate and concrete shelters for soldiers checking drivers’ IDs or searching their vehicles.”The moment the truce was signed, everything changed 180 degrees. The Israeli government is making the Palestinian people pay the price,” said Ahmad, a policeman who works in Ramallah.Israeli military spokesman Nadav Shoshani did not comment on whether there had been an increase in the number of checkpoints but said the military used them to arrest wanted Palestinian militants.”We make sure that the terrorists do not get away but the civilians have a chance to get out or go wherever they want and have their freedom of movement,” he said in a media briefing on Wednesday.- ‘Like rabbits in a cage’ -Basiel said that now, when the gates are closed, “I have to wait, or I have to take another way” into Taybeh, a quiet village known for its brewery.He said that on Monday people waited in their cars from 4:00 pm to 2:00 am while each vehicle entering the village was meticulously checked.Another Ramallah area resident, who preferred not to be named for security reasons, compared his new environment to that of a caged animal.”It’s like rabbits living in a cage. In the morning they can go out, do things, then in the evening they have to go home to the cage,” he said.Shadi Zahod, a government employee who commutes daily between Salfit and Ramallah, felt similarly constrained.”It’s as if they’re sending us a message: stay trapped in your town, don’t go anywhere”, he told AFP.”Since the truce, we’ve been paying the price in every Palestinian city,” he said, as his wait at a checkpoint in Birzeit dragged into a third hour.- Impossible to make plans -Before approving the Gaza ceasefire, Israel’s security cabinet reportedly added to its war goals the “strengthening of security” in the West Bank.Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said in a statement on Tuesday that Israel “is merely shifting its focus from Gaza to other areas it controls in the West Bank”.A 2019 academic paper by Jerusalem’s Applied Research Institute estimated that at the time Palestinians lost 60 million work hours per year to restrictions.But for Basiel, the worst impact is an inability to plan even a day ahead.”The worst thing that we are facing now, is that we don’t have any vision for the near future, even tomorrow.”

All signs of life have disappeared from the bombed-out houses and empty streets of the Lebanese border town of Naqura, but despite a fragile Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire that has held since November, no one can return.The Israeli military is still deployed in parts of Lebanon’s south, days ahead of a January 26 deadline to fully implement the terms of the truce.The deal gave the parties 60 days to withdraw — Israel back across the border, and Hezbollah farther north — as the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers redeployed to the south.The Lebanese military has asked residents of Naqura not to go back home for their own safety after Israel’s army issued similar orders, but in spite of the danger, Mayor Abbas Awada returned to inspect the destruction.”Naqura has become a disaster zone of a town… the bare necessities of life are absent here,” he said in front of the damaged town hall, adding he was worried a lack of funds after years of economic crisis would hamper reconstruction.”We need at least three years to rebuild,” he continued, as a small bulldozer worked to remove rubble near the municipal offices.Lebanese soldiers deployed in coastal Naqura after Israeli troops pulled out of the country’s southwest on January 6, though they remain in the southeast.The Israelis’ withdrawal from Naqura left behind a sea of wreckage.Opposite the town hall, an old tree has been uprooted. Empty, damaged houses line streets filled with rubble.Most of the widespread destruction occurred after the truce took hold, Awada said.”The Israeli army entered the town after the ceasefire” and “destroyed the houses”, he said.”Before the ceasefire, 35 percent of the town was destroyed, but after the truce, 90 percent of it” was demolished, he added, mostly with controlled explosions and bulldozers.- Smell of death -Under the November 27 ceasefire deal, which ended more than a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese army has 60 days to deploy alongside UNIFIL peacekeepers in south Lebanon as Israel withdraws.At the same time, Hezbollah is required to pull its forces north of the Litani River, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the border, and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure it has in the south.Both sides have accused each other of violations since the truce began.Around the nearby UNIFIL headquarters, houses are still intact, but almost everywhere else in Naqura lies destruction.Facades are shorn from bombed-out houses, while others are reduced to crumpled heaps, abandoned by residents who had fled for their lives, leaving behind furniture, clothes and books.AFP saw a completely destroyed school, banana plantations that had withered away and unharvested oranges on trees, their blossoming flowers barely covering the smell of rotting bodies.On Tuesday, the civil defence agency said it had recovered two bodies from the rubble in Naqura. Lebanese soldiers who patrolled the town found an unexploded rocket between two buildings, AFP saw.In October 2023, Hezbollah began firing across the border into Israel in support of its ally Hamas, a day after the Palestinian group launched its attack on southern Israel that triggered the Gaza war.An Israeli army spokesperson told AFP that its forces were committed to the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon.They said the army was working “to remove threats to the State of Israel and its citizens, in full accordance with international law”.- ‘We want the wars to end’ -On the coastal road to Naqura UNIFIL and the Lebanese army have set up checkpoints.Hezbollah’s yellow flags fluttered in the wind, but no fighters could be seen.Twenty kilometres to the north, in Tyre, Fatima Yazbeck waits impatiently in a reception centre for the displaced for her chance to return home.She fled Naqura 15 months ago, and since then, “I haven’t been back”, she said, recounting her sadness at learning her house had been destroyed.Ali Mehdi, a volunteer at the reception centre, said his home was destroyed as well.”My house was only damaged at first,” he said. “But after the truce, the Israelis entered Naqura and destroyed the houses, the orchards and the roads.”In the next room, Mustafa Al-Sayed has been waiting with his large family for more than a year to return to his southern village of Beit Lif. He had been forced to leave once before, during the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.”Do we have to take our families and flee every 20 years?” he asked. “We want a definitive solution, we want the wars to end.”