Arrival in Ramallah

I have arrived in Ramallah, West Bank, the seat of the Palestinian Authority. On July 5, I traveled to Ramallah with a high ranking Palestinian official, and we had to stop at one checkpoint on the way. I saw dozens of Israeli settlements, and I heard lots of stories about them. Israelis will go into an area and select a site on top of a mountain for a new settlement, like a neighborhood. They erase whatever is there, and surround the neighborhood with walls and barbed wire, and post military guards at the entrance. They take the water from the Palestinians, often in the valleys below, and use it for their new homes. The settlers sometimes take the olive trees that have been farmed by Arabs for hundreds of years and dig them up to put them within the walls of their new settlements.
These settlements severely limit the movement of Palestinians. Often roads are built only for the new settlers, which makes travel for a couple dozen miles extremely difficult. The settlements seem to be strategic in nature. The people that live in them have taken the high ground, and often displace Palestinians from their homes and farmland. The high level of water use makes it tough to successfully farm, and the inhibition of movement caused by the settlements makes taking farm produce to market very hard because it is not fresh after traveling in the heat for many hours. I am convinced that no peace can happen without dealing with these problematic intrusions into the West Bank.