Israeli Curfews Expand Hardships Imposed on Palestinians
They came walking across the scrubby hillside this afternoon in long, ragged lines, hundreds of Palestinians, mostly women, picking their way along dirt paths under a burning sun, back to their home villages after mostly unsuccessful efforts to get food or medical treatment during a brief lifting of the curfew in Bethlehem.

Sakiena Abed al-Qader was one who succeeded. She said she had walked for nearly an hour with her 17-year old daughter-in-law, who was about to give birth to her first baby, to get her to the hospital.

"I had to walk — there wasn't any other way," said Ms. Qader, 50. "It was very, very difficult because she couldn't walk. It was the most difficult moment of my life because it was very dangerous."

The Israelis have imposed curfews on Nablus, Tulkarm, Jenin, Qalqilya, Ramallah and Bethlehem, in addition to Hebron, leaving only Jericho, which had been quiet and thus, army officials have said, unlikely to be seized.

More than 700,000 people in the seven cities are confined to their homes under Israeli curfews that are only lifted every two or three days, usually for about two hours.

But the clampdown, which includes barbed wire barricades separating village from village, affects roughly two million people in the West Bank because Palestinian society is structured around villages spreading out from central cities, where there are markets, schools and medical facilities.

Today, for example, scholastic tests had been scheduled to determine who could go to college. Few managed to take them, Palestinians said.

In Hebron, where about 450 Jewish settlers live in a fortified enclave among 120,000 Palestinians, and where there has been frequent conflict between them, Palestinian residents were nowhere to be seen.

At every turn of the main city road that branched off into Palestinian neighborhoods, military checkpoints, big concrete blocks or bulldozed earthworks barred the way.

Iron doors were pulled down and Palestinian families, who have repeatedly been placed under curfew here for several years, stayed inside. Israeli soldiers in the red berets of the Paratroop Regiment supervised checkpoints, while others in helmets and full combat gear were on patrol.

Jewish settlers drove through the streets unhindered, and their children rode bicycles.

…in Hebron today, four Palestinian police officers were killed in an exchange of fire with the Israeli troops as the Israelis tried to take over the fortresslike hilltop municipal building, a relic built by the British after World War I. Afterward, the local Palestinian security chief, Nizam Jaabri, surrendered, along with a score of other Palestinian police officers.

On the outskirts of town, glimpses could be seen of men wearing black-and-white blindfolds as they were taken off for questioning after being detained on a bus with blacked-out windows.

A tour through both the northern and southern sections of the West Bank today found the main roads deserted, except for a single car containing Jewish settlers.

The main route, Highway 60, going north to Nablus, was virtually deserted. At the Arab village of Sinji, north of Ramallah, where there is a welcome sign on an arch, someone had replaced the Palestinian flag with a blue-and-white Israeli banner.

Outside Nablus, in the northern stretch of the West Bank, two trucks bringing flour to a United Nations refugee depot were delayed at a checkpoint for four hours, a driver said.

Israeli tanks were atop a nearby hill, and a four-story apartment building overlooking the Balata refugee camp had been taken over by the army, military officials said, with about 20 residents held on one floor, their cellphones confiscated.

"It's hard to enforce the curfew in Balata," said Capt. Kobi Veller, the Israeli commander of the post. "People are very undisciplined. They go out during curfew.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/26/international/middleeast/26MIDE.html