Israel must step in if it bans the UN agency that is a lifeline for Gaza, UN says

RAMALLAH: Abdullah Fauzi, a banker from the northern West Bank city of Nablus, leaves home at 4 a.m. to reach his job by 8, and he’s often late.
His commute used to take an hour — until Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, after which Israel launched its offensive in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military also ramped up raids against Palestinian militants in the northern West Bank, and diverted its residents through seven new checkpoints, doubling Fauzi’s time on the road.
Now it’s gotten worse.
Since the ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas took effect, Fauzi’s drive to the West Bank’s business and administrative hub, Ramallah, has become a convoluted, at least four-hour wiggle through steep lanes and farm roads as Israel further tightens the noose around Palestinian cities in measures it considers essential to guard against militant attacks.
“You can fly to Paris while we’re not reaching our homes,” the 42-year-old said from the Atara checkpoint outside Ramallah last week, as Israeli soldiers searched scores of cars, one by one.
“Whatever this is, they’ve planned it well,” he said. “It’s well-designed to make our life hell.”
A ceasefire begets violence
As the truce between Israel and Hamas took hold on Jan. 19, radical Israeli settlers — incensed over an apparent end to the war and the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli hostages — rampaged through West Bank towns, torching cars and homes.
Two days later, Israeli forces with drones and attack helicopters descended on the northern West Bank city of Jenin, long a center of militant activity.
More checkpoints started going up between Palestinian cities, slicing up the occupied West Bank and creating choke points the Israeli army can shut off on a whim. Crossings that had been open 24/7 started closing during morning and evening rush hours, upturning the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
New barriers — earthen mounds, iron gates — multiplied, pushing Palestinian cars off well-paved roads and onto rutted paths through open fields. What was once a soldier’s glance and head tilt became international border-like inspections.
Israel says the measures are to prevent Hamas from opening a new front in the West Bank. But many experts suspect the crackdown has more to do with assuaging settler leaders like Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and an important ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has threatened to topple the government if Israel does not restart the war in Gaza.
“Israel now has a free hand to pursue what it has wanted to in the West Bank for a long time: settlement expansion, annexation,” said Tahani Mustafa, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “It was considered a potential trade-off.”
Asked why Israel launched the crackdown during the ceasefire, the Israeli military said politicians gave the order in part over concerns that the release of Palestinian prisoners — in swaps for Israeli hostages held by Hamas — could raise tensions in the West Bank.
The checkpoints all over the West Bank, it said, were “to ensure safe movement and expand inspections.”
“Checkpoints are a tool we use in the fight against terror, enabling civilian movement while providing a layer of screening to prevent terrorists from escaping,” said Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman.
Life disrupted
To spend rush hour at an Israeli checkpoint is to hear of the problems it has brought — Palestinian families divided, money lost, trade disrupted, sick people kept from doctors.
Ahmed Jibril said not even his position as manager of emergency services for the Palestinian Red Crescent protects him.
“We’re treated like any other private car,” he said, describing dozens of cases in which Israeli soldiers forced ambulances to wait for inspection when they were responding to emergency calls.
In one case, on Jan. 21, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported that a 46-year-old woman who had suffered a heart attack in the southern city of Hebron died while waiting to cross a checkpoint.
The Israeli military said it was not aware of that specific incident. But citing Hamas’ use of civilian infrastructure like hospitals to conceal fighters, the army acknowledged subjecting medical teams to security checks “while trying to reduce the delay as much as possible in order to mitigate harm.”
The UN humanitarian agency, or OCHA, reported that, as of last Nov. 28, Israel had 793 checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank, 228 more than before the war in Gaza.
The agency hasn’t updated the tally since the ceasefire, but its latest report noted a surge in “suffocating restrictions” that are “tearing communities apart and largely paralyzing daily life.”
A bubble bursts
With its upscale restaurants and yoga studios, Ramallah gained a reputation in past conflicts for being something of a well-to-do bubble where cafe-hopping residents can feel immune to the harsh realities of the occupation.
Now its residents, struck in numbingly long lines to run simple errands, feel under siege.
“All we want to do is go home,” said Mary Elia, 70, stalled with her husband for nearly two hours at the Ein Senia checkpoint north of Ramallah last week, as they made their way home to east Jerusalem from their daughter’s house. “Are we meant to never see our grandchildren?”
Suddenly, her face contorted in discomfort. She had to urinate, she said, and there were hours to go before they crossed.
A national obsession
Roll down the window at a bottlenecked checkpoint and the same soothing female voice can be heard emanating from countless car radios, reeling off every Israeli checkpoint, followed by “salik” — Arabic for open — or “mughlaq,” closed, based on the conditions of the moment.
These reports recently beat out weather broadcasts for top slot on the West Bank radio lineup.
Almost every Palestinian driver seems able to expound on the latest checkpoint operating hours, the minutiae of soldiers’ mood changes and fiercely defended opinions about the most efficient detours.
“I didn’t ask for a Ph.D. in this,” said Yasin Fityani, 30, an engineer stuck in line to leave Ramallah for work, scrolling through new checkpoint-dedicated WhatsApp groups filled with footage of soldiers installing cement barriers and fistfights erupting over someone cutting the line.
Lost time, lost money
It was the second time in as many weeks that his boss at the Jerusalem bus company called off his morning shift because he was late.
Worse still for Nidal Al-Maghribi, 34, it was too dangerous to back out of the queue of frustrated motorists waiting to pass Jaba checkpoint, which severs his east Jerusalem neighborhood from the rest of the city. Another full day’s work wasted in his car.
“What am I supposed to tell my wife?” he asked, pausing to keep his composure. “This job is how I feed my kids.”
Palestinian trucks, packed with perishable food and construction materials, are not spared the scrutiny. Soldiers often ask truckers to pull over and unload their cargo for inspection. Fruit rots. Textiles and electronics get damaged.
The delays raise prices, further choking a Palestinian economy that shrank 28 percent last year as a result of punitive Israeli policies imposed after Hamas’ attack, said Palestinian Economy Minister Mohammad Alamour. Israel’s ban on most Palestinian workers has left 30 percent of the West Bank’s workforce jobless.
“These barriers do everything except their stated purpose of providing security,” Alamour said.
“They pressure the Palestinian people and the Palestinian economy. They make people want to leave their country.”

MUGHRAQA, Gaza Strip: New details and growing shock over emaciated hostages renewed pressure Sunday on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to extend a fragile Gaza ceasefire beyond the first phase, even as US President Donald Trump repeated his pledge that the US would take control of the Palestinian enclave.
Talks on the second phase, meant to see more hostages released and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, were due to start Feb. 3. But Israel and Hamas appear to have made little progress, even as Israeli forces withdrew Sunday from a Gaza corridor in the latest commitment to the truce.
Netanyahu sent a delegation to Qatar, a key mediator, but it included low-level officials, sparking speculation that it won’t lead to a breakthrough. Netanyahu, who returned after a US visit to meet with Trump, is expected to convene security Cabinet ministers on Tuesday.
Trump weighs in on Gaza again
Speaking on Sunday, Trump repeated his pledge to take control of the Gaza Strip.
“I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza. As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it. Other people may do it through our auspices. But we’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back. There’s nothing to move back into. The place is a demolition site. The remainder will be demolished,” he told reporters onboard Air Force One as he traveled to the Super Bowl.
Trump said Arab nations would agree to take in Palestinians after speaking with him and insisted Palestinians would leave Gaza if they had a choice.
“They don’t want to return to Gaza. If we could give them a home in a safer area — the only reason they’re talking about returning to Gaza is they don’t have an alternative. When they have an alternative, they don’t want to return to Gaza.”
Trump also suggested he was losing patience with the deal after seeing the emaciated hostages released this week.
“I watched the hostages come back today and they looked like Holocaust survivors. They were in horrible condition. They were emaciated. It looked like many years ago, the Holocaust survivors, and I don’t know how much longer we can take that,” he said.
Israel has expressed openness to the idea of resettling Gaza’s population — ”a revolutionary, creative vision,” Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Sunday — while Hamas, the Palestinians and much of the world have rejected it.
Egypt said it will host an emergency Arab summit on Feb. 27 to discuss the “new and dangerous developments.”
Trump’s proposal has moral, legal and practical obstacles. It may have been proposed as a negotiation tactic to pressure Hamas or an opening gambit in discussions aimed at securing a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia condemned Netanyahu’s recent comment that Palestinians could create their state there, saying it aimed to divert attention from crimes committed by “the Israeli occupation against our Palestinian brothers in Gaza, including the ethnic cleansing they are being subjected to.”
Qatar called Netanyahu’s comment “provocative” and a blatant violation of international law.
Hostage families say time is running out
Families of remaining hostages said time is running out as some survivors described being barefoot and in chains.
“We cannot let the hostages remain there. There is no other way. I am appealing to the cabinet,” said Ella Ben Ami, daughter of a hostage released Saturday, adding she now understands the toll of captivity is much worse than imagined.
The father of a remaining hostage, Kobi Ohel, told Israel’s Channel 13 the newly released men said his son, Alon, and others “live off half a pita to a full pita a day. These are not human conditions.” Ohel’s mother, Idit, sobbed as she told Channel 12 her son has been chained for over a year.
Michael Levy said his brother, the newly released Or Levy, had been barefoot and hungry for 16 months. “The decision-makers knew exactly what his condition was and what everyone else’s condition was, and they did not do enough to bring him back with the urgency that was needed,” he said.
On Saturday, as Israelis reeled, former defense minister Yoav Gallant said on social media that the deterioration in hostages’ conditions was something “Israel has known about for some time.”
The ceasefire’s extension is not guaranteed
The ceasefire that began on Jan. 19 has held, raising hopes that the 16-month war that led to seismic shifts in the Middle East may be headed toward an end.
The latest step was Israel forces’ withdrawal from the 4-mile (6-kilometer) Netzarim corridor separating northern and southern Gaza, which was used as a military zone. No troops were seen in the vicinity Sunday. As the ceasefire began last month, Israel began allowing hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to cross Netzarim and return to the north.
But the deal remains fragile. On Sunday, civil defense first responders in Gaza said Israeli fire killed three people east of Gaza City. Israel’s military noted “several hits” after firing warning shots and warned Palestinians against approaching its forces.
Cars piled with belongings headed north. Under the deal, Israel should allow cars to cross Netzarim uninspected. Troops remain along Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt.
Hamas spokesperson Abdel Latif Al-Qanoua said the troops’ withdrawal showed the militant group had “forced the enemy to submit to our demands” and thwarted “Netanyahu’s illusion of achieving total victory.”
Israel has said it won’t agree to a complete withdrawal from Gaza until Hamas’ military and political capabilities are eliminated. Hamas says it won’t hand over the last hostages until Israel removes all troops.
During the ceasefire’s 42-day first phase, Hamas is gradually releasing 33 Israeli hostages captured during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the war in exchange for the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and a flood of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Israel has said Hamas confirmed that eight of the 33 are dead.
Families of the hostages gathered in Tel Aviv to urge Netanyahu to extend the ceasefire, but he is also under pressure from far-right political allies to resume the war. Trump’s proposal for the US to take control of the Gaza Strip may also complicate the situation.
“They are dying there, so we need to finish this deal in a hurry,” said Ayala Metzger, daughter-in-law of hostage Yoram Metzger, who died in captivity.
The war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’ attack that killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostage, has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not differentiate between fighters and noncombatants in their count. Much of the territory has been obliterated.
Violence in the occupied West Bank
Violence has surged in the occupied West Bank during the war and intensified in recent days with an Israeli military operation against Palestinian militants in the territory’s north.
On Sunday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli gunfire killed two women, one of them, Sundus Shalabi, eight months pregnant. It said Rahaf Al-Ashqar, 21, was also killed. The shooting occurred in the Nur Shams urban refugee camp, a focal point of Israeli operations.
Israel’s military said its police had opened an investigation.
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz on Sunday announced the expansion of the operation that started in Jenin several weeks ago. He said it was meant to prevent Iran — allied with Hamas — from establishing a foothold in the West Bank.