Olive trees have grown in these lands for thousands of years, a sign of permanence and resistance. They are politically important. Their oil was used to anoint kings and economically essential. Now, including for Ahmed, he used to make good money working in Israel. But after the atrocities of October the seventh, almost all travel between Arab and Israeli areas was stopped and he lost his job.

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Sometimes I pick olive, other times I clean ropes. I chase work from day to day. In Israel, I used to work every day. I went there in the morning and left in the late afternoon. There's no work now. I work one day here, one day there in the fields picking olive. I need to feed my family. What can I do?

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And it's not just economic life that's been affected. Travel for Palestinians around the West Bank has been severely limited since October the seventh.

You.

Cannot come and go. They have closed roads. I can only walk around my home. If you have land, you can walk it, but you have to remain close to your home. I cannot neither go right nor left. Checkpoints are.

Suffocating The.

West Bank is divided into three areas: A, B, and C. A is run exclusively by the Palestinian Authority, Israelis are banned from entering. B is jointly administered, and C is run by Israel with the IDF responsible for security. Palestinian areas are split into small pockets with Israeli roads often dividing them. Now, under the previous government of Naftali-Bennet, the expansion of roads here in the West Bank was put on hold, but that has been completely reversed by Benjamin Netanyahu. That decision was welcomed by many in the Israeli settler movement. More than half a million live in the West Bank. The UN and many countries say all settlements are illegal and an obstacle to peace, something vehemently denied by the residents of a threat.

In general, we have not stolen anyone's land. We are people that go to work in the morning. We run businesses, we have professors at university. We are people of the book and not of the sword, and that's the way we would prefer to live. This war has been forced on us. We didn't choose it.

15,000 people live in this community just across the valley from Bethlehem. They say they have always had good relations with the Arab neighbors, but October the seventh changed everything.

I hope and I believe that the relations with our immediate neighbors here in the Arab villages, the relationships will continue to be good. Having said that, obviously, there are security concerns because there were instances near the Gaza Strip of Kibbutz where they had fantastic relationship with Arabs working on the kibbutz and later discovered maps describing the kibbutz village with the names of the families, how many people were living in each house.

The people that live here in a frat are separated from their nearest Arab neighbors by just a couple of hundred meters, a few farmsteads, and a couple of fences. The last month has seen a massive Israeli security operation in the West Bank. They have arrested more than 1,400 Palestinians. They claim most were connected to Hamas. Just today, the Palestinian authorities said 18 people had been killed, taking the total to 170 in the last month. It has been met with Palestinian protest, both at the security crackdown and the increasing death toll from Israel's war in Gaza. Today in Bethlehem, there was a general strike. This is a more peaceful and prosperous part of the West Bank, but there are areas where there have been direct conflict between communities. In particular, some groups of settlers have been accused of attacking Palestinians. Here, one shoots a man in his leg. Oded Ravivie is a threats long-serving mayor. He says those settlers are an extremist fringe who do not represent his community.

Now we understand that there is a small group of extremists that do act violently, and he understands that these people need to be dealt with by the police, by the military services, by the secret services, and they should be trial for what they do. The vast majority of people, Jewish people who live here, half a million Jewish people who live here, deserve security, deserve to be treated like human beings, like law, people who obey the law because that's the nature of these communities. Last night we had a meeting with the Prime Minister of all the mayors in Sudan, Samaria. There was a consensus of all the mayors calling for the government to make sure that these extremists get arrested, get stopped. The quicker it happens, the less damage it will do to the Jewish population in Sudan, Samaria, and definitely to the whole state of Israel.

Because they're giving you a bad name.

I'm disputed. I can agree with a BBC reporter on that.

For years, the call has been for a two-state solution, an independent Palestinian nation in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. But that would require sacrifices from places like a threat that they will be unwilling to make and wider Israeli society unlikely to enforce. As he finishes his day's work, Ahmed's concerns are more simple.

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Peace and security. To come and go with our cars, to see our children, to see.

Peace.

To live in our country without problems. We are looking to be able to feed our children. That's all.

Even before the events of the seventh of October, the West Bank was seeing a rise in violence. Two communities who both feel a connection to this land. Agreement was never going to be easy. It now seems further away than ever.