Ehud Barak, Israel's Minister of Defense and thus the person to know, says that the roadblocks in the West Bank are an important element in Israeli's ability to combat terror, which means to save lives, and so they stay. Saeb Arekat naturally sees this as an obstacle to negotiations and so on, and complains that roadblocks throttle the Palestinian economy. Apparently he hasn't connected the dots: if roadblocks hurt the Palestinians, but they're necessary to save lives, maybe the thing to do is to remove the attempt to kill civilians that make the roadblocks necessary?
The same article, by the way, notes that nine Palestinians were killed today. Eight by other Palestinians, including an old man and a boy, and one so-called "militant" by Israeli forces. They were all killed in Gaza, where there are no Israeli roadblocks.
Anyway, if you have any doubt about the veracity of Barak's statement, here are the statistics as supplied by the Israeli authorities. They are a bit different from those supplied yesterday by B'tselem, but not dramatically so. And note Israel's Inverted Moore's Law, first postulated here yesterday.
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