Palestinians wait to cross the Rafah border in the souther Gaza Strip, during one of its rare openings earlier this year. (Hatem Omar, Maan Images)

Twenty-one-year-old Palestinian student Berlanty Azzam was seized by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in the West Bank last month. Bound and blindfolded, she was forcibly deported to the Gaza Strip. Berlanty was in her final semester at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, and was returning from a job interview in Ramallah.

The problem was that she had an ID card registered in Gaza, and the Israeli occupation, in the words of the human rights organisation, B'tselem, "almost completely forbids the movement of Palestinians between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip".

Bethlehem university has had "continuous problems" getting Gaza students the requisite permission from Israel, according to communications officer Stephanie Rhodes.

"We are a Palestinian university and these are Palestinian students. The West Bank and Gaza Strip are supposed to be treated as one territorial unit, but that's not what's happening."

Rhodes was referring to how Israel's division of the Palestinian territories goes against its own recognition of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as "a single territorial unit" in previous agreements. This was also affirmed by the Israeli supreme court in 2002 as part of a justification for the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank to Gaza. The court ruled that this did not violate international law because the two areas "should be regarded as one territory".

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Restricting Palestinian students' freedom of movement has been just one element of Israeli measures that deepen the separation between the Gaza and the West Bank. While the bitter split between Fatah and Hamas has led some to talk about two different Palestinian "states", the physical division is one that Israel has created over a number of years.

From the start of the second intifada in 2000 to 2005, "travel from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank declined by 98%". This restriction was imposed in the name of security, though in most cases where there was an appeal, the decision to deny a permit was reversed. But the "disengagement plan" in summer 2005 marked a real sea change.

To understand why Israel's policy towards severing ties between Gaza and the West Bank became more formalised and political post-disengagement, it is necessary to recall the reasons for this strategic redeployment in the first place.

First, the withdrawal was aimed at freezing the peace process, preventing Palestinian statehood. In the words of a senior adviser to then prime minister Ariel Sharon, disengagement from Gaza supplied "the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians".

The second strategic aim was to consolidate the colonisation of the West Bank. Sharon told the Knesset that "whoever wishes to preserve the large Israeli settlement blocs under our control forever ... must support the disengagement plan". Taking settlers out of Gaza, he affirmed, meant that Israel could focus its "efforts" on areas like "Greater Jerusalem" and the "settlement blocs".

This is the context in which to understand how Israel has sought to tear up the Oslo commitment to keeping Gaza and the West Bank as "one territorial unit". In May 2007, before Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, the minister for strategic affairs (now foreign minister) Avigdor Lieberman presented a plan for "isolating the Strip from the West Bank" and considering them as "two separate entities".

To read the full article please visit The Guardian.