AL QUDS: A young mother carrying her child in her arms approaches an Israeli army checkpoint near the village of Jaba, between Al Quds and Ramallah.

She pleads with the soldiers to let her through so that she can reach her village, not too far from the checkpoint.

A group of young female university students carrying duffel bags also approach the same checkpoint pleading with the soldiers in English to let them pass.

“We are university students,” one of them said. “We do not have classes any more because of the curfew on Ramallah and we want to get home.”

A mother and her five young children between the ages of 11 and three go through the same routine, and a young man and his wife.

What all these people had wanted to do was to cross the checkpoint to take a West Bank taxi cab waiting on the other side to their respective villages in the northern West Bank.

The soldiers refused to let them through because they were West Bank residents. The military ordered them to go back. But for them, the question was: Go back where?

They had left Ramallah during a brief lifting of the curfew on Saturday hoping to reach their hometowns.

They had been in Ramallah either for work, to go to college or maybe were visiting family before the Monday morning Israeli military incursion and reoccupation of the city, and found themselves stranded.

It was not easy for them to leave Ramallah in the first place. It had been under a 24-hour curfew since Monday and isolated from the outside world.

They had to walk across mounds of dirt or ditches the Israeli army had dug up around Ramallah to prevent vehicles leaving. They had to walk through rough and difficult terrain to avoid army checkpoints.

And when the soldiers at the Jaba checkpoint told them they could not cross, they had to look for alternative routes out, because the return to Ramallah was just as difficult or impossible.

“They (the soldiers) told us to go back,” said the man walking back from the Jaba checkpoint with his wife.

“We have to look for other ways through the mountains,” he said, hoping to catch a cab that would drive them to his home village in the northern Jordan Valley.

All the Palestinians turned back at the checkpoint decided to walk across rough paths in open fields at the risk of being spotted and shot at or chased by Israeli military personnel. Most had already been hunted. They were desperate, but would not give up.

So they sat around, waiting for the army to leave and an opportunity to continue the difficult road home.

Scenes of Palestinians leaving towns during the lifting of curfews or trying to cross checkpoints to reach their villages, or hospitals in the cities, or schools, have been common throughout the West Bank.

The Israeli army progressively sealed off each Palestinian population centre in the West Bank after the outbreak of the uprising at the end of September 2000 and prevented movement of people from these places.

More than two million Palestinians have been locked up at different times inside their villages, towns, refugee camps and cities.

Recently, with an around-the-clock curfew imposed on seven out of eight West Bank cities and other towns and villages, more than 800,000 Palestinians have been confined to their homes for days in a row.

The curfew is lifted only for a few hours every three or four days to allow people to stock up on supplies or visit a doctor, but not to leave their towns or resume normal life.

Universities have to shut down because students and teachers cannot attend classes, forcing students who have taken up residence in university towns to leave and return to their hometowns.

With work also disrupted, people who moved to the cities to work have also decided to return to their villages or other towns or cities and rejoin their families to wait for the end of the crisis.

But for them, the problems multiply as they face the difficulty of movement on West Bank roads and between population centres.

Yet, they do not have that many choices, other than to take the risk and keep moving forward.—dpa