AWARTA, West Bank >> The freshly spray-painted signs in this hamlet outside Nablus are a symbol of the new normal in the West Bank, seven months into a scattershot wave of Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

With the Israeli military having shut down the main road, local teenagers put up signs to coax Palestinian drivers along circuitous routes to Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian government, and Huwara, a neighboring village.

Such pop-up checkpoints and closings lasting several days have disrupted the routines of Palestinian residents, whose ability to move through the occupied territory was already precarious. But the pinpointed strategy targeting mainly individual villages sporadically is a stark departure from the widespread closings and curfews Israel imposed on West Bank cities during the second intifada, making its effect harder for the world — and even people next door — to see and feel.

Palestinian officials and their backers denounce the road closings as collective punishment. They have not, however, gained much traction for protest among their own people, because residents of one village sometimes have no inkling what is happening a few miles away, and Ramallah, the center of West Bank political and civic life, has remained largely immune.

The Israeli military says the closings are aimed only at apprehending suspects and preventing further attacks in a wave that is far less severe, sustained or widespread than previous uprisings. Its calibrated approach has helped contain international condemnation of Israel’s crackdown.

“You are seeing Israel operating on lessons learned from the second intifada,” said Nathan Thrall, a Jerusalem-based analyst for the International Crisis Group. “Don’t do generalized closures. Don’t restrict work permits. Do the opposite.”

He described the current methods as a “desire to keep everything localized and to minimize the negative effect for the population at large.”

Since the surge of stabbings, shootings and vehicular attacks began in October, Palestinians have killed 26 Israelis, a Palestinian bystander and two Americans. The Palestinian Health Ministry counts more than 200 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces during that period, most during attacks or suspected attacks.

In addition to carrying out the closings, Israel has demolished at least 36 homes belonging to the families of Palestinians who perpetrated attacks. It has also delayed the return of some bodies of Palestinian assailants, citing concern about the funerals’ fomenting further violence.

At the same time, despite the drumbeat of attacks, Israel has offered carrots as well as sticks, including 30,000 new permits for Palestinians to work in Israel, where day wages of $50 are double what they typically earn in the West Bank, bringing the total number of such permits to 88,000.

Asked about the road closings, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, denied that they were intended as broad punishment for Palestinians and noted that certain West Bank locations “have been frequent hot spots” for attacks.

“Security measures have been utilized in order to prevent the daily attacks,” Lerner said in an email, “and at the same time facilitated the daily access of tens of thousands of Palestinians to Israel and movement throughout the region.”

But Ihab Hamad, a contractor who lives in the West Bank and has worked for years in Israel overseeing Palestinian construction crews, dismissed the recent increase in work permits as a poor salve against the closings. He said he was unable to obtain a permit this month and suspects that is because he lives in a village near a road where Palestinian youths had recently thrown rocks at Israeli vehicles — a road lately subjected to closing.

“This scramble just took us 45 minutes,” Hamad, 33, complained after completing a circuitous detour through backwater villages and across orchards. “Every time somebody throws a rock, are you going to close a road?”

The road closings come on top of existing checkpoints that have pushed many Palestinian-registered vehicles off a wider, well-paved byway that Israel built and maintains between its West Bank settlements and onto the often shabbier paths that crisscross underneath or run parallel to it.

One recent afternoon on the route from Ramallah to Nablus, Palestinian motorists bypassed a traffic jam caused by Israeli soldiers searching vehicles by driving through a nearby orchard. Further ahead, Palestinian cars were blocked from another road, forcing a detour through a steep, dusty quarry.

At the entrance to Nablus, two soldiers informed drivers that the road into the city would be open only until 5 p.m. — and that the exit from the city onto the main road would not open until after 10.

The reason for the new restriction was unclear. Some Palestinians surmised that it was related to a larger checkpoint at a nearby junction that was the site of several attacks. Asked about it later, an Israeli military spokeswoman said the partial closing was to avoid backups while an infrastructure project was underway.

Local teenagers like Mahmoud Hussein tried to help by scrawling back-road directions.

“We did the signs ourselves,” he said as his buddies excitedly directed traffic through the village of Awarta.

The most continuous closing has been imposed in an always tense area of confrontation in the Old City of Hebron, the scene of multiple attacks targeting Israeli soldiers who guard Jewish settlers living in the area.

Since November, the Israeli military has prevented most Palestinians beyond the few dozen families registered as living in the adjacent area, known as Tel Rumeida, from entering it.

“Not one girl has become engaged, and not one girl has had a wedding,” said Mufid al-Sharabati, whose five children include two single, marriage-age daughters. “Our suffering is great.”

The Israeli military’s efforts to shut down the violence is helped by the West Bank’s topography, where Palestinian villages are dotted through rural hills, often interrupted by Jewish settlements. Only a few roads connect the villages, which Thrall, the International Crisis Group expert, said made it easier to “contain a fire and stop it from spreading.”

After a Palestinian who shot and injured two soldiers March 11 was suspected to have fled to the village of Beit Urr al-Tahta, Israeli forces shut down a main road nearby. That effectively cut off seven villages, upturning the lives of their 35,000 residents. The usual 15-minute commute to Ramallah was suddenly a convoluted hourlong wiggle through narrow lanes and farm roads.

“The students are late for school, the teachers are late for school, the employees are late for work,” said Ali Al-Shamy, a 60-year-old factory owner.

Shamy and other residents found the closing especially baffling because the road in question is generally used only by Palestinians, leaving little risk that would-be attackers would use it to hunt Israelis.

“I swear to God, they are just messing with us,” grumbled Omar Mousa, a 50-year-old bus driver, who steered his vehicle onto the main road the morning after Israeli forces suddenly lifted their closing of the area.

He pointed to the nearby Route 443, the Israeli-built four-lane highway that hurtles through the West Bank, lined by barriers that largely prevent access from Palestinian communities. “We don’t see them,” he said.

© 2016 The New York Times Company