Winter is arriving late in the West Bank. The fields are freshly ploughed in the stark uplands south of Hebron, the powdery red soil ready to receive its seeds when the rains finally come.

But across the geometric furrows a monstrous yellow bulldozer is making its way lazily down the valley, accompanied by four slouching Israeli soldiers. It is pushing the earth in its path, making way for one of the costliest roads in Israel, if not the world.

The road to be built here is one of the less publicised products of the Wye Agreement, the reworking of previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinians that was finally signed by Binyamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat, at President Clinton's urging, last month.

In return for turning over 10 per cent of the occupied West Bank - plus a patch of the barren Judaean desert which is to become a "nature reserve" - Israel has saddled the Palestinian Authority with onerous security commitments.

Although the deal is progressing and the first tranche of land has been returned, the atmosphere between these two "peace partners" becomes ever more rancorous. Ordinary Palestinians are wondering what they are really getting out of a process which promised peace but daily seems to deliver only more humiliation.

The first casualty of the Wye agreement was the ban on "unilateral actions", a euphemism dreamt up by the State Department which means that Israel should halt all new settlement, while Arafat should stop telling the world that he will declare Palestinian statehood next May when the five-year Oslo interim accords expire.

However, Ariel Sharon, Israel's veteran Foreign Minister, has urged settlers to grab West Bank hilltops and Arafat and his Cabinet have, if anything, stepped up their statehood declarations.

But it is the agreements that Arafat kept hidden from his people that are really hurting Palestinians such as 73-year-old Mohamed Ahmed Sneiwah or 16-year-old Akif Jakhadmeh, who sullenly regards the big yellow bulldozer while keeping an eye on his herd of goats: agreements like the road that is to connect the small and isolated Jewish settlements of Tene Amurim and Ashkelot, on the southern fringes of the West Bank close to the town of Dahariyeh.

Just six kilometres long, the road is supposed to improve the security and wellbeing of the settlers, who number just 30 families at Ashkelot and perhaps a hundred at Tene Amurim, according to Israeli peace monitor groups. So if a settlement bypass road costs a million shekels a kilometre to construct, that's six million (about #1 million) spent on connecting around 600 people living on two tiny hilltops.

The road will certainly not benefit the Palestinian population, for what use is a road that connects two fortified, forbidden zones? It will certainly make life harder for Mohamed Ahmed Sneiwah, who is watching his pastures being cleft in two by the big yellow bulldozer. "That's my land that they are taking and I can't do a thing about it," says the stooped old man, fiddling anxiously with his keffiyeh headdress. "We take our food from this land, it has been in my family since the days of the Turks. We were all glad when they signed this agreement, but when I see them taking our lands, our trees, I get very angry."

It is a picture repeated all over the West Bank, from Ramallah to Nablus, Jenin and Bethlehem. Thirteen new roads leading nowhere except from settlement to settlement. The United States is footing the bill to the tune of some #700m under the pretext of guaranteeing Israeli security, although the State Department is so embarrassed by the extent of the project that it is obfuscating the issue.

It is all part of Netanyahu's desperate attempts to sweeten the pill for the settlers' leaders, although some observers say the settlers themselves would prefer to accept compensation and leave now, instead of delaying the inevitable.

Rateb al-Asabar, mayor of Dahariyeh, may be a veteran of Arafat's Fatah movement, but he is appalled at what his leader has done. 'We were all very surprised, they only let us know a week ago, by which time they had already begun work on the road. Everyone in the village is affected because they are all tied to the land.

"The Palestinian Authority should have consulted with us, but we heard nothing. And they call this 'land for peace'. But without land what are we doing here? They are not giving us land and they are not giving us peace, they are just taking more from us and calling it peace."

Palestinian negotiator Hanan Asfour confirmed that at Wye it was agreed that some bypass roads could be built, but said he was surprised when he discovered there were to be 13.

But it's all a bit late for Mohamed Ahmed Sneiwah, who can only watch the slow work of the bulldozer destroying his winter fields. "Nobody came here to protest. Arafat lives in Gaza but I do not know how I am going to live."