Palestinians wait to cross the Huwwara checkpoint, south of the West Bank city of Nablus. (Rami Swidan, Maan Images)

Striding atop a patch of brown earth he rents here, Sadiq Nazal plucks leaves from one of the 200,000 almond-tree saplings he has planted this season in neat rows across a sun-drenched plain. The Palestinian farmer has bet his nursery business on these saplings, but may never get them to market. "Imagine," he says, "if no one buys them."

The problem: For seven years, Palestinian movements within the West Bank have been tightly restricted by a shifting, maze-like network of Israeli military checkpoints, barricades and permit requirements. This gauntlet, growing in size and severity over the past two years, keeps away most of Mr. Nazal's customers, the farmers who plant his trees and then harvest the olives, nuts and other fruits they yield.

Israeli defense officials say the travel restrictions are vital for securing their citizens against terrorism. But the barriers also are choking the Palestinian economy, creating what the World Bank calls "a shattered economic space" of 10 separate enclaves. Per-capita GDP has fallen 40% for Palestinians since 2000. Economists largely blame the plunge on the restrictions and a loss of Palestinian employment in Israel.

The splintering of the West Bank is undermining a crucial plank in the Bush administration's latest plan for the region. The White House wants to bolster the West Bank economy, mainly through aid and development, to buoy moderate leaders, roll back growing Islamist influence and enhance prospects for peace. Forging a broader Israeli-Palestinian accord is the focus of an international conference expected to take place next week in Annapolis, Md., but dwindling hopes for progress there are expected to increase the pressure to find tangible ways to improve Palestinian life.

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Washington launched an urgent economic and diplomatic push in the West Bank this summer, after the Iranian-backed Islamist group Hamas -- which won Palestinian parliamentary elections the year before -- took military control of the Gaza Strip in a bloody sweep. The U.S. responded by trying to isolate Hamas in Gaza and bolster the Western-leaning Fatah party, which still holds a tenuous grip over Palestinian institutions in the West Bank. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice brought up the difficulties of the movement restrictions in every meeting she had with senior Israeli officials on a diplomatic mission in October, according to a senior U.S. official. She was back in the region earlier this month ahead of the Annapolis meeting.

Palestinian workers at a nursery outside of Jenin plant thousands of almond-tree seedlings in plastic sleeves last December.

The roadblocks started going up in force after the 2000 Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. The Israelis eased them briefly in 2005, but have been throwing them back up since. In the West Bank, some 52% of Palestinians now live below the poverty line, according to Near East Consulting, a Palestinian survey and research firm that has worked for the United Nations and the World Bank. The World Bank concluded in a May report that the blockages create so much uncertainty and inefficiency that business owners can't run their operations normally. That in turn chokes off the growth and investment needed to rekindle the region's economy, the bank concluded.

Mr. Nazal's 20-year-old Al Karmel Nursery illustrates the damage, and the difficulty of recovery. Checkpoints and closures over the past seven years have kept him from tending his fields and have increasingly depressed demand for his plants by damaging the businesses of his customers. It's also difficult for them to even reach his nursery.

Mr. Nazal now relies primarily on international aid groups that try to bridge the security strictures by purchasing his trees and distributing them to farmers. Despite their best intentions, such groups are poor substitutes for free-market forces: They never tell Mr. Nazal until harvest time what they're going to buy, meaning he must plant blindly at the start of each season. He can either guarantee a small amount of sales by planting a little bit of everything, or fill his fields with only one or two varieties in an all-or-nothing gamble.

After seven years of losses, Mr. Nazal says only a banner season can keep him afloat now. So this year he's risking everything on the almond trees. "This has been a catastrophe for me," he says of the economic chaos. Around the West Bank, growing numbers of business owners are similarly dependent on such assistance from aid groups.

A 44-year-old father of three with a bushy brown moustache, Mr. Nazal has spent his lifetime in the fields where his almond saplings rise today. His family started growing lemon trees on this fertile plain west of Jenin in the 1940s.

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