On the first page of Nathan Thrall’s book, Abed Salama leads his five-year-old son Milad though crowded alleyways under a “matrix of cables and wires and string lights”.

Anyone who drives or walks in the West Bank outside Jerusalem will come away with images of tangles, lattices and labyrinths, great and small — from the makeshift knots of utility lines in Palestinian neighbourhoods to the strategic web of fences, walls, roads and checkpoints that slice and dice the territory captured from Jordan in the war of 1967 and occupied by Israel.

This landscape of separation, formally embedded in the soil and scree of the Judaean Hills by the 1993-95 Oslo Accords, shapes every act and event in Thrall’s meticulous but heartfelt account of a school bus crash and its agonising aftermath. Geography may be destiny. On this stony earth, however, history, politics and power fix the facts on the ground.

Thrall, an American Jewish journalist and researcher from California, lives in Jerusalem