Razor wire now cuts directly through the heart of Chouk Chey, a Cambodian village, stretching across its sugar cane fields.
Beyond the wire, just over the border, tall black screens rise to hide the Thai soldiers who installed them.
This marks the new, fortified boundary between Thailand and Cambodia—a frontier that was once open and easily crossed by people from both sides.
Everything changed at 15:20 local time on 13 August.
“The Thai soldiers came and told us to leave,” said Huis Malis. “Then they unrolled the razor wire. I asked if I could return to collect my cooking pots. They gave me only 20 minutes.”
Malis is among 13 families now cut off from their homes and farmland on the far side of the wire—land they say they have lived and worked on for decades.
Thai authorities have since erected signs warning Cambodians that they were illegally encroaching on Thai soil.
Residents of Chouk Chey insist the border should follow a straight line between two stone boundary markers agreed upon more than a century ago.
Thailand, however, argues it is simply defending its territory amid ongoing tensions with Cambodia—a view Phnom Penh disputes.
After months of simmering friction, the dispute erupted into open conflict in July, leaving about 40 people dead. A fragile ceasefire has held since then, but nationalist rhetoric on social media continues to inflame tensions.
The BBC visited Cambodia’s border areas, speaking to villagers trapped between the two countries and witnessing firsthand the scars left by five days of shelling and bombing.
