More than 900 Israeli Checkpoints.. An Investigation into the Cost of Restrictions on Palestinian Lives

Bethlehem - Areej Investigation - Oq News - Aref Jaber climbs the walls of houses, then moves between rooftops and courtyards, trying to reach his home.

He has no options; the Israeli forces have closed the alleys and streets of the neighborhood with concrete blocks and barbed wire fences. There remains only one exit for the one hundred and forty families living in the neighborhood; the "160" checkpoint, which has been closed again for no known reason.

It is enough for the soldiers to decide to close it based on their mood, or under the pretext of a technical malfunction in the inspection devices, or due to some event.

Aref says that this exit has been closed for at least two days a week over the past three years. Therefore, the residents have devised a network of alternative routes; Jaber (51 years old) crosses them after seeking permission from his neighbors, who watch the windows in anticipation of the soldiers, while he climbs the stairs cutting across the rooftops. Jaber says: "And when I enter the house on the other side, I feel like I have achieved a great accomplishment."

The encirclement of Jaber's neighborhood is a miniature model of what the lives of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have come to. While the bloody violence of settlers is seizing Palestinian lands in the West Bank, and the genocide continues in Gaza, Israel is expanding its system of control and military dominance.

Since 2023, the occupation has continued its approach to divide Palestine at an accelerated pace, and the West Bank has fragmented, where about 3.5 million Palestinians live, and it is no longer a connected geographical area. Today, it is cut through by 925 military checkpoints, according to the latest UN count in December 2025; including fixed and temporary checkpoints, iron gates, and earth mounds. It is worth noting that the Palestinian Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission announced in September of this year that the number of these checkpoints has risen to 942. This system of fragmentation has scattered families, disrupted the economy, and hindered Palestinians' access to essential services, including schools and hospitals.

Aref Jaber climbs a ladder in his garden to reach the roof of his neighbor's house, from where he crosses to the street in Jaber neighborhood in Hebron. Photo: Samar Hazboun

Israel has never published a list of its military checkpoints, nor the times they open or close. As for Google Maps, there is no mention of the checkpoints, and they are of no use to Palestinians anyway; as they often lead them to the prohibited Israeli settlement routes. Therefore, Palestinians have built their own communication networks, through which they exchange news about closures and road conditions.

To our knowledge, no entity has combined these networks with any recent data or fieldwork to measure the impact of the checkpoints on daily life in the West Bank.

Thus, over the course of a year and a half, we at Areej, Wired, and the Palestine Journalism Lab have undertaken an investigation into the system that has isolated the West Bank into 'cantons,' and we have documented its effects.

We analyzed tens of thousands of messages exchanged by Palestinians on Telegram to deal with the daily closures.

Then we surveyed, in partnership with the Institute for Social and Economic Progress (ISEP), hundreds of people from across the West Bank to understand the repercussions of the barriers on their lives.

We manually verified the locations of more than 800 barriers, using satellite images and field coverage, and we tracked 2.6 billion GPS signals on the map, emitted by vehicles in the West Bank navigating through the closures.

174 earth mounds

126 closed road gates

115 concrete barriers to close the roads

91 barriers

74 open road gates

69 partial barriers

63 obstacles on the roads

44 partial barriers with a closed gate

40 partial barriers with an open gate

26 earthen walls

9 trenches

1 mobile barrier

3 other obstacles/No data

We also recorded 2.6 billion GPS location signals on the map, issued by cars in the West Bank navigating through the closures.

We manually verified the locations of more than 800 checkpoints, using satellite images and field coverage.

174 earth mounds

126 closed road gates

115 concrete barriers to close the roads

91 barriers

74 open road gates

69 partial barriers

63 obstacles on the roads

44 partial barriers with a closed gate

40 partial barriers with an open gate

26 earthen walls

9 trenches

1 mobile barrier

3 other obstacles / No data

The number of new Israeli checkpoints in the last three years exceeds the number of checkpoints added during the previous 18 years combined.

211 checkpoints in 2023

624 checkpoints in 2025

On average, a Palestinian driver in the West Bank, who travels by car several times a week, loses about an hour and a half each week on top of the original travel time in an attempt to avoid the checkpoints. This amounts to 77 wasted hours in a year.

In other cases, the delay is even longer; the road between Ramallah and Al-Eizariya east of Jerusalem, which used to take 48 minutes to cover a distance of 27 kilometers, now requires an hour and forty minutes via an alternative route of 45 kilometers.

Our data shows that drivers in the West Bank are forced to take complicated routes to avoid military checkpoints.

According to the median route recorded in our data, those who commute back and forth four days a week lose about seven additional hours of their time weekly.

As for those who travel four times a week between Ramallah and Hebron, they lose more than 12 additional hours weekly.

There are only about five kilometers separating the towns of Anabta and Beit Lid east of Tulkarm.

It used to take 10 minutes, but today it takes 50 minutes in each direction.

The delay time at the checkpoints has increased by more than 50 percent since October 2023, according to our analysis of the data, often extending to several hours in a single trip.

In total, Palestinians in the West Bank, collectively, who commute regularly and others, lose the equivalent of 30 years of their lives every day.

The data can count the checkpoints and document the lost hours at closed gates; but how does this system turn the life of a single family upside down and reshape it?

The blocked university road.

About ten years ago, Amal returned with her family from the United States to the village of Janiya, northwest of Ramallah, and they built a house with a garden, facing a beautiful mountainous view.

When the family arrived, the main entrance to Janiya had been closed for more than ten years. The occupation closed the eastern road in 2003, making it today an entrance to the settlement of "Talmon" built on the village's land.

Amal's family only knew the road to the west, through the neighboring village of Ras Karkar. Fifteen minutes separated them from a shop owned by her husband in Ramallah.

Then her daughter Lina continues the same route on her way to university, where she studies computer engineering.

If the roads were opened, Lina's daily journey would take about 20 minutes to cover 12 kilometers.

However, the detour routes around the closures have doubled the distance to 32 kilometers, taking 47 minutes.

As for her daughter Dana*, she takes the longer route to another university, becoming the first dentist in the family.

Dana can complete her journey of 35.5 kilometers in 47 minutes. However, she often takes 90 minutes now.

The perpetrator

Ras Karkar

Ramallah

Birzeit University

Al-Quds University

Every day that Dana and Lina head to the university, they lose about an hour daily at the checkpoints and on the detour roads. When calculating the hours over the academic year, each of them loses about three days and nights.

Amal says: "We went around and around and ended up at the same point... I swear I'm dizzy, I'm dizzy... but when you get there, you get upset. You start saying, what kind of life is this?". "You can endure it once, twice, a year, two years, but when it exceeds a certain limit, you can't bear it anymore."

30 percent of Palestinians surveyed in the West Bank said that checkpoints have prevented them from starting or completing their university education. Most students living outside major cities are forced to pass through at least one military checkpoint to reach the nearest university.

Last summer (2026), Amal's family decided to move to Ramallah to avoid the burden of another school year in Al-Janiya. Amal says: "It's true that one feels sad to leave their country, but they have no choice."

One in ten people in the West Bank say they have moved to other cities or governorates because of the checkpoints, in addition to 31 percent who are considering moving for the same reason.

A narrower world, even narrower.

The roads that used to connect Palestine with each other have been closed; by military borders and restrictions, through Israeli permits, and finally by the imposition of hundreds of checkpoints.

Khalil al-Tufkaji, an expert in land and settlement, has been following the construction of this system over the past decades. He says that the barriers in the West Bank aim to cut communication between regions and create a state of fragmentation, until society begins to close in on itself: "Belonging becomes to the city itself, not to the homeland."

Layers of the system that besiege Palestinians have accumulated over decades. British colonialism sometimes closed roads, implemented inspections, and imposed restrictions and permits that defined Palestinians' rights to move and drive.

During the Nakba of 1948, Zionist gangs displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, emptying hundreds of villages of their inhabitants or destroying them.

As for those who remained in Palestine, the occupation imposed an 18-year military rule on them, preventing them from working, trading, studying, or receiving treatment outside the borders of their towns without an Israeli permit.

When the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza were occupied in 1967, Israel applied the same permit system there, dividing Palestinians into categories, each with a different color identity card that determined the scope of their movement accordingly.

In 1988, reports from the special committee of the United Nations classified the closure of areas in the occupied territories as explicit collective punishment.

The second phase of the Oslo Accords came in 1995, under which a framework was established to pave the way for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state, yet it deepened the fragmentation of the Palestinians by cutting the West Bank into enclaves.

With the onset of the new millennium, closures and permits became a reality; in 2002, Israel began constructing the annexation and expansion wall extending 713 kilometers, 85 percent of which runs deep inside the West Bank.

It has imposed a continuous blockade isolating the Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine since 2007.

Since then, the restrictions of the occupation have intensified more and more.

Since 1948, each Palestinian generation inherits a world narrower than the one before. Grandparents in Jenin tell stories of lunch in Jerusalem, or vacations in Beirut.

While parents in the West Bank long for a visit to Gaza from years ago, their children remember school trips to the ruins of Jericho, the amusement park in Tulkarem, and the zoo in Qalqilya. Today, most West Bank residents have never visited Gaza, according to an (ISEP) survey. More than 40 percent of those surveyed said they have never seen the sea in their lives, even though they can see the Mediterranean coast on the horizon from the heights of the West Bank.

The West Bank today lives a new chapter of fragmentation, with three-quarters of its population having relatives in other governorates. However, a quarter of parents said their children have not met relatives from other areas of the West Bank. It is a generation trapped within narrow geography; about a third of young people under twenty-five say they have never left their governorate in their lives.

In response to questions from "Wired", the Israeli army stated that "decisions regarding the installation of checkpoints and their opening or closing are made according to assessments of the field situation and security considerations only", noting that this policy "is subject to continuous modification based on field assessments, balancing the freedom of movement of the population with security requirements."

In a message sent to the Central Command in June, according to Haaretz, the Israeli army's legal advisor, Kobi Marcus, clarified that the current tightening of the checkpoint system has exceeded any legal justification. The newspaper added that he warned that the increasing movement restrictions imposed on the population without official authorization since October 2023 could violate fundamental rights and principles of international law.

Rima Hamami, a professor of anthropology at Birzeit University, describes the current situation as unprecedented: "Every population gathering, every village, and every Palestinian city will turn into a separate prison. If there is no confrontation, they will continue to impose that without stopping."

Other parts of the world have witnessed military checkpoints, as in Sri Lanka and Iraq, but Hamami emphasizes that there is no place that compares to the system established in the West Bank in terms of "its density, the extent of its scope, and its comprehensiveness."

Dispersing the family

For six years, Dr. Reem Yassin's life has revolved around the settlement road 60, which extends from the north of the West Bank to the south, and the main road between Nablus and Ramallah.

Yassin worked as a resident physician in the anesthesia department at An-Najah Hospital, one of the most important hospitals in Nablus, located 45 kilometers from her home in Ramallah.

When she started her medical residency in 2020, Reem said her commute to work took about forty minutes only. After October 2023, the Israeli army set up three additional checkpoints on the shortest route between Ramallah and Nablus, and the frequency of closures at the existing checkpoints between them increased.

With the birth of her first daughter, Yara, Reem began taking her daily to her grandmother's house in Asira al-Qibliya south of Nablus, adding a new checkpoint to the journey; "Al-Murabba'a," branching off from Road 60.

Data analysis shows that the Al-Murabba'a checkpoint has become one of the busiest checkpoints in the West Bank since October 2023; it has repeatedly turned into a bottleneck, choking the only outlet to the city of Nablus with the closure of other roads. Passing through it takes between twenty and thirty minutes under normal conditions, but delays of hours have not been uncommon.

Reem would prepare her bag at night, as if getting ready for a flight: snacks, a breast pump, and spare clothes for herself and Yara. Then she leaves her apartment in Ramallah just before six in the morning to drop her daughter off in Asira before passing through "Al-Murabba'a."

She says: "I no longer have a life; I see my daughter for an hour at night and then go to work, and the rest of the time is spent at the checkpoint." She is one of a third of mothers and fathers in the West Bank who say that checkpoints regularly deprive them of seeing their children before bedtime.

Palestinians cannot predict road conditions; there are no expected patterns. Cars may pass through the checkpoint immediately without any noticeable delay, and then conditions can change in an instant, with sudden closures delaying them for hours at the same checkpoint. On June 13 and 14, 2025, when Israel began its airstrikes on Iran, about 70 percent of military checkpoints were suddenly closed, according to our analysis of data taken from Telegram; an increase of approximately 350 percent compared to the previous week.

Alexandra Reiche, a professor of cultural geography who has spent years studying checkpoints in the West Bank, sees unpredictability as a fundamental mechanism employed by the occupation. The uncertainty of whether a Palestinian can reach work or school today, and the inability to predict what might expose them to punishment, has a profound impact on people's lives. Reiche states, 'Arbitrariness itself is excessive violence.'

The roads connecting all the governorates of the West Bank converge at several checkpoints.

Their closure is enough to separate the north from the south, forcing drivers away from their destination before they can return to it, leaving an entire city hostage to a few monitored exits.

One checkpoint divides the West Bank.

Every trip from the southern West Bank to the center and north narrows at the Container checkpoint in Wadi Nar.

One checkpoint divides the West Bank.

When its gates are closed, the West Bank is split into two separate parts.

To head south, go north.

The fastest route from Ramallah to East Jerusalem and the southern West Bank passes through the Jab'a checkpoint.

To head south, one must go north.

When it is closed, often to secure a smooth route for settlers, Palestinians are forced to take detours in the opposite direction: they head north and then turn east, returning to their destination in the south.

With its remaining outlet closed, the city, home to sixty thousand Palestinians, is almost completely isolated.

When passing each checkpoint, Reem follows specific steps; she opens the windows before the soldiers ask her to lower them, then prepares for the script she has memorized by heart: "Show your ID, where are you going? Where are you coming from? What do you do? And why are you here?" Sometimes a soldier brings his phone close to her face and takes a picture of her with her ID, and photographs the car's license plate. A soldier once leaned out of the window and said, "You are beautiful."

She often saw men pinned face down on the hoods of cars, their hands shackled behind their backs, amidst the soldiers' shouting. On her way back, she sometimes found the same men in the same place, still in detention.

About two-thirds of the survey participants said that fear and humiliation are the predominant feelings they experience at checkpoints. Among those who were stopped at a checkpoint in the past six months (2026), about 40 percent reported that their vehicles were searched, and more than 20 percent mentioned that they underwent physical searches, while nearly one in seven said that a soldier pointed a weapon at them.

Over time, it became futile for Reem to take her daughter to Aseera. Most nights, she resorted to staying at her family's house closer to Nablus, while her husband, Montaser, remained in Ramallah, visiting her on some weekends and ending his visit on Saturday morning, before the settlers' movement intensified on Road 60 and the situation at the checkpoints worsened.

As Yara grew older, she began to ask questions: "Every day, as soon as we open our eyes in the morning, she asks me: Mama, why didn’t you take us to Baba?".

In the end, the checkpoints exceeded Reem's capacity to endure. Moving to her family's house was not enough, and she continued to lose hours at the checkpoints. After the birth of her second child at the beginning of this year (2026), she decided not to return to work and extended her maternity leave to rethink what would come next: either a temporary break, or looking for a job closer if available, or perhaps an opportunity outside Palestine. She says: "I don’t want to repeat my experience with Yara." Since then, Reem has resigned from her job at the hospital.

A deadly delay.

In the summer of 2024, Israeli forces shot a young man from the village of Asira al-Qibliya. He sustained a leg injury that did not pose a threat to his life, but after the occupation detained the ambulance transporting him at a checkpoint for about an hour, his condition worsened to "acute hemorrhagic shock," as narrated by Reem.

Reem was the doctor who received him during her internship at the Rafidia Government Hospital in Nablus. She tried to revive him, but his blood pressure dropped to critical levels.

Reem recalls those moments saying: "We were about to lose him at certain moments, you have to keep giving him blood, blood, blood." The young man survived, but what happened to him is not an exception; about two-thirds of the population in the West Bank say that military checkpoints have hindered their access to medical care.

Between October 2023 and September 2026, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society documented 237 cases in which occupation forces prevented medical teams from reaching the injured and sick, and 240 cases of delays in their medical missions at checkpoints and elsewhere. Among the incidents witnessed in early 2026: soldiers detaining a medical team at the Sarra checkpoint, soldiers throwing ambulance keys down a mountain slope at the Hawara checkpoint, and paramedics having to transport a Palestinian woman in labor between two vehicles through closed gates. In response to "Wired" questions regarding the obstruction of medical teams, the Israeli army stated: "According to international law, the Israeli army allows freedom of movement for medical vehicles, including ambulances, for the purpose of providing medical treatment and evacuating the injured."

These obstructions have fatal consequences, as the Red Crescent attributes the deaths of 25 people since 2023 to the occupation's hindrance of its medical teams' work. In July 2026, reports emerged of the death of the Palestinian infant Ahmad Zaid, after the vehicle transporting him was prevented from crossing a checkpoint for more than an hour.

In response to these circumstances, the Red Crescent has established field ambulance points close to population gatherings, after repeated obstruction of ambulances, and access to hospitals is no longer guaranteed. Médecins Sans Frontières has also started training volunteers in first aid to enable them to handle emergency cases when ambulances are delayed or prevented from crossing checkpoints.

Staying at the company

Since October 2023, the checkpoints in Nablus have recorded the highest delay rates in the West Bank. Residents of the city spend, on average, more than one hour and fifty minutes weekly trying to avoid the checkpoints, while those who commute regularly for work or study report even longer delays. Among them is Ali Al-Haj Ali, who has been working for ten years at 'Sama Pharmaceutical Industries' east of the city, and at the age of thirty-seven, he supervises the maintenance of production lines. He leaves at the end of his shift at four-thirty in the afternoon and does not expect to reach home before eight in the evening at best, even though the distance is no more than sixteen kilometers from his home in the town of Jama'in.

On some nights, he is unable to reach his home at all, forcing him to sleep at the company, in a space that was originally prepared during the Corona pandemic; it includes only a bed and twelve mattresses, which have become necessary for those who have lost their means of returning home.

Ali Al-Haj Ali says: 'My children, my wife, and my mother and father, I barely get to see them. I forget friends, forget weddings, and occasions.' But he cannot give up his job, and he has no choice.

Ali talks about his experience while sitting in the meeting room of "Sama" company alongside his colleague Ahood Khattab. They quickly began to complete each other's stories, recalling the "Nablus Barrier Crisis," as they call it, in the years 2024 and 2025. Ali would arrive at the checkpoint some mornings, waiting for hours, before becoming frustrated and turning back home.

He says: "Nothing is guaranteed, that's how our country is.. our country is just fate."

Ahood, the quality assurance manager at the factory, is thirty-eight years old and a mother of three. Her town, Beit Furik, is located southeast of Nablus, and there is only one gate for entering and exiting the town, which controls the course of her entire day.

The town had to establish a special protocol, as Ahood calls it: for every three private cars that pass, one taxi is allowed. However, the rhythm is beyond their control, interrupted by the changing of soldiers on duty.

At best, when the gate is open and traffic is flowing, the journey from Sama company to Beit Furik takes fifteen minutes. But it took her more than five hours daily for a year and a half, reaching up to ten hours of waiting on the worst days. In 2024, her son finished his final exam in biology at his school in Nablus just before her shift ended. Their meeting was at the Beit Furik gate at four-thirty in the afternoon, amidst a queue of cars, all trying to pass through the only outlet for a town inhabited by about sixteen thousand people.

They waited there together until three in the morning.

She says: "The ordinary employee, who is not separated from work by a checkpoint, goes home, eats, showers, sleeps, and starts dreaming, while I am still at the checkpoint."

The checkpoints have reshaped employment policies in the West Bank, as the company "Sama" was forced to reject candidates with high qualifications after assessing the checkpoints they would have to cross to reach work, according to Ahood, and included a clear condition in job advertisements; that applicants must be residents of the same governorate and have the ability to endure the pressure of commuting.

In late 2025, Ahood's youngest son, Aws, contracted jaundice a week after his birth. She took him with her husband to the hospital. On the way back, the soldiers began to close the gate.

"Go back," shouted the soldier in Arabic across the gate.

"Where do we go back to?" the husband asked. "We have a sick child with us."

The soldier raised his weapon aiming at them, according to Ahood, and she said to her husband: "For God's sake, let's go back," but he tried again, offering to return alone if the soldiers allowed Ahood and the infant to cross the gate on foot. The soldier lost his temper: "He told him, I'll shoot you."

They returned to wait in line for an hour and a half, the infant crying in his mother's arms, until the soldier opened the gate again.

Aref Jaber says that by the year 2000, all roads to Jaber neighborhood in Hebron, which bears his family's name, were closed off with earth mounds and concrete blocks. By 2010, the occupation forces had installed iron gates and checkpoints manned by soldiers. Three years ago, new closures were imposed on the entrances to the houses themselves, and the gates were surrounded by a tight iron fence.

The neighborhood is located between the Ibrahimi Mosque and the settlement outposts in the heart of the city and the Kiryat Arba settlement. It has only one access point: a roundabout gate, a security room equipped with electronic scanning devices, an iron gate, and a military watchtower, collectively forming a barrier of 160. Jaber says about crossing it: "It's like entering from one country to another," but the country on the other side is nothing but his home.

The Israeli forces imposed a nighttime curfew on the neighborhood from ten o'clock at night until seven in the morning for months following October 2023. Today, the checkpoint is closed every weekend, starting from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning, prohibiting residents from leaving or entering the neighborhood. Aref says that those who pass away on Sunday are lucky, as they can be buried on the same day; however, those who die on Saturday must have their burial postponed until the checkpoint reopens.

The residents of the neighborhood await Israeli approval for every little thing, from evacuating a patient, holding a funeral, to bringing in a cooking gas cylinder. They cross the checkpoint on foot, climb the hill, carrying their sick and their purchases to the neighborhood, and drag their bags down towards the checkpoint. Aref intended to enroll his six-year-old grandson in a primary school just fifty meters from their home, but it is behind an earth mound wrapped in barbed wire, which means that reaching it requires a three-kilometer detour on roads under the control of settlers. Aref waves to his cousins, who live behind the earth mound, saying: 'They have a second life there, we are in the closed area.'

Under the ongoing pressure of apartheid, Palestinians can still imagine another life. On January 6, 2026, at around three in the afternoon, a Palestinian driver approached the container checkpoint, which has cut off the only road connecting northern and southern occupied West Bank since 2000. He noticed something strange: no soldiers on the road, and the checkpoint was open. He raised his phone, filmed a twenty-second video, and posted it on a local channel on Telegram.

The video spread across the West Bank within an hour. Confusion reigned, is this really happening? Has the occupation removed its checkpoints in the West Bank?

At 5:57, the supervisors of the 'Road Conditions' group on Telegram were exchanging jokes, with one of them saying that he should start removing the checkpoints from his notebook.

At 6:10, the group announced that the soldiers had returned. Two minutes later: the gates were closed.

No official explanation was published for what happened. Some speculated that it was just a training exercise for the Israeli forces, while others thought it was merely a shift change. But for a few hours, people allowed themselves to imagine the West Bank without checkpoints; a West Bank that could be traversed from its farthest south to its north, a distance of one hundred and thirty kilometers, in less than two hours.

And for a moment, they experienced a world where they had the luxury of planning for the next day and the hour to come; a world where Amal's daughter could reach her lecture in just a few minutes, and where Reem wouldn't have to leave her job to meet her husband and two daughters. They imagined a world where Ali could arrive before his children's bedtime, and where her son’s commitments could take him to the hospital without a gun being aimed at him. A world where you could continue driving, perhaps to Haifa, Gaza, or wherever you wished.

And then, Aref Jaber walks in his street, passing by those stairs he no longer needs. He will open the door of his home and finally be in his house.

Design: Sam O'Keefe, Ben Hinks, Alyssa Walker, Divya Ribeiro, and Aman Bhargava (Revijual Labs).

Site Development: Sam O'Keefe.

Information Verification: Ither Al-Atham (Areej) and Dania Suleiman (Wired).

Editing and Production: Reyhan Harmanji, Huda Othman, Seth Fried Weiser, Ariadne Papageorgiou, Henriette Shaqar, and Eva Konstantaras.

This investigation was produced in partnership between Areej and the Palestine Journalism Lab and Light House Reports, and published in English on Wired.