Taxi-fleet owner Abu Nail al-Jabari said improvements were limited.
“It’s getting a little faster for us to travel to major West Bank cities,” he said. “But there are 400 [Israeli-made] earth mounds and other physical obstacles on roads in the West Bank ... Detours take up fuel, time, money.”
RAMALLAH
This city is the envy of the others. As the administrative capital close to Jerusalem, Ramallah benefited from the sense of remoteness felt in cities like Nablus closed off behind Israeli checkpoints.
“The activity in Ramallah is at the expense of the activity in Jerusalem and the rest of West Bank cities,” says entrepreneur Mazen Sinokrot, because it is the seat of the Palestinian Authority, big companies and bank headquarters.
He attributed the city’s boom to the influx of investors from East Jerusalem, where they feel Israeli measures to assert their sovereignty over the city have become too burdensome.
GAZA
Under what the World Bank calls the “extreme closure” of a tight Israeli blockade, the Mediterranean coastal enclave where 1.5 million Palestinians live is now all but divorced from the economy of the West Bank.
Its public sector is paid from foreign aid cash trucked in by security vans. It gets much of its food and energy in UN and EU aid, and some brought in commercially under Israeli inspection.
Most other goods are supplied by a smuggling industry running tunnels under the Egyptian border.
International donors have pledged some US$4 billion for reconstruction, but a ban on the import of cement and steel has prevented the work from starting.
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