Technology
Technology Choke Points
Wasted time. Lost tasks. Lost good friends. Lost household.
Lost Lives.
How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank.
Illustration: Hokyoung Kim
Technology Choke Points
Wasted time. Lost tasks. Lost pals. Lost household. Lost lives. How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank.
Illustration: Hokyoung Kim
Aref Jaber is on a next-door neighbor’s roofing system, attempting to get home.
At 51, he is climbing over a wall into the next yard, up onto the next roofing system, along the line of stone homes that stand in between him and his own front door. He has no option. Streets and side road in his area have actually been sealed with cement blocks and barbed wire, and a single point of gain access to, called Checkpoint 160, is the only method or out for the 140 households who live there.
Checkpoint 160 is closed once again; Jaber is not sure why. The impulse of a soldier, a crash in the scanning system, breaking news in the area– it might be anything.
For the last 3 years, he states, this has actually taken place a minimum of 2 days a week. The neighborhood has actually designed a system of alternative paths. Jaber calls his next-door neighbors to ask if he can come through. They examine their windows for soldiers, and after that Jaber scales ladders and passes through roofings. “When I lastly get home,” he states,” it seems like I’ve attained something huge.”
The enclosure of Jaber’s area is a thick microcosm of what life is ending up being throughout the occupied West Bank– for Palestinians, that is. At the exact same time that fatal Israeli inhabitant violence robs neighborhoods in the West Bank of their land, and in the middle of the genocide in Gaza, Israel has actually broadened its facilities of military control and dominance.
Given that 2023, Israel’s fragmentation of Palestine, underway for generations, has actually sped up. The West Bank has, for the almost 3.5 million Palestinians who live there, disappeared as an adjoining area. According to the most current UN information from December 2025, a minimum of 925 repaired and short-lived checkpoints, metal gates, obstructions, and earth mounds divide the West Bank.( A Palestinian governmental commission reported this month that the number is now 942.) This fracturing has actually torn households apart, suppressed the economy, and blocked access to vital services such as health centers and schools
Israel has actually never ever openly noted the checkpoints it runs, their staffing hours, or their closure times. On the ground, Google Maps is almost worthless for Palestinians; it is blind to the checkpoints and attempts to path chauffeurs onto roadways scheduled for Israeli-plated vehicles. Rather, residents have actually established their own advertisement hoc networks to notify each other of closures.
As far as we understand, no company has actually utilized that network– integrated with brand-new datasets and on-the-ground reporting– to determine what this does to every day life.
Over 18 months, WIRED, Lighthouse Reports, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) and the Palestine Reporting Lab examined the system that has actually sculpted the West Bank into cantons and determined what it cost individuals to move through it.
We examined 10s of countless Telegram messages Palestinians sent out to browse day-to-day checkpoint hold-ups and closures
Dealing with the Institute for Social and Economic Progress (ISEP), a Palestinian research study company, we surveyed numerous individuals throughout the West Bank to learn how checkpoints form their lives.
Israel has actually never ever openly noted the checkpoints it runs, their staffing hours, or their closure times. On the ground, Google Maps is almost worthless for Palestinians; it is blind to the checkpoints and attempts to path motorists onto roadways booked for Israeli-plated cars and trucks. Rather, residents have actually established their own advertisement hoc networks to notify each other of closures.
As far as we understand, no company has actually utilized that network– integrated with brand-new datasets and on-the-ground reporting– to determine what this does to life.
Over 18 months, WIRED, Lighthouse Reports, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) and the Palestine Reporting Lab examined the system that has actually sculpted the West Bank into cantons and determined what it cost individuals to move through it.
We examined 10s of countless Telegram messages Palestinians sent out to browse day-to-day checkpoint hold-ups and closures.
Dealing with the Institute for Social and Economic Progress (ISEP), a Palestinian research study company, we surveyed numerous individuals throughout the West Bank to discover how checkpoints form their lives.
We mapped 2.6 billion GPS pings of chauffeurs browsing the roadways and closures.
We by hand validated over 800 motion barriers utilizing satellite images and on-the-ground reporting. Check out and download the complete map of confirmed checkpoints here.
The variety of motion challenges in the West Bank increased by more in the previous 3 years than it did over the previous 18.
The typical West Bank commuter– somebody who drives numerous times a week– loses about an hour and a half every week to extra travel time in an effort to prevent checkpoints. Throughout a year, that totals up to 77 hours lost.
For some, the hold-ups are far longer. Individuals going from Ramallah to Al-Eizariya, on the edges of Jerusalem, might do so in 27 kilometers/48 minutes. Rather, it’s 45 kilometers/100 minutes.
Our information reveals that individuals need to take all sorts of intricate paths to prevent checkpoints.
Anybody who commutes 4 days a week from Ramallah to Hebron is robbed of over 12 additional hours of travel time.
One set of towns, Anabta and Beit Lid, are 8 kilometers apart.
It utilized to be a 10 minute drive. It now regularly takes 50 minutes each method.
SATELLITE IMAGE © 2026 VANTOR
Our information analysis discovered that checkpoint hold-ups have actually increased by more than 50 percent in the after-effects of October 2023, regularly going beyond hours at a time.
Together, Palestinians in the West Bank lose about Thirty years every day
Information can count the checkpoints, clock the closures, and tally the hours lost at evictions. How does the system overthrow the life of a single household?
Technology Losing Access to an Education
More than a years earlier, Amal and her household left the United States. They returned to a home in Al-Janiya, where they developed a home with a garden, and a mountain view. “Mashallah,” she states of it still. (The names have actually been altered due to security issues.)
By the time the household showed up, Al-Janiya’s primary entryway had actually currently been closed for over a years. Israel sealed the eastern roadway in 2003; it now works as an entryway to Talmon, an Israeli settlement developed on the town’s land.
Every day that Dana and Lina drive to their universities, they each lose about an hour on the circuitous path and at checkpoints. Throughout a scholastic year, they have actually lost about 3 days each due to the detours.
“You loop and loop and wind up at the very same point … I swear, I get woozy … By the time you show up, you’re simply unfortunate. You sit there asking yourself: what is this life?” Amal stated. “You can take it once. Twice. For a year. Then it crosses some limit and you can’t.”
Thirty percent of people in the West Bank said that checkpoints have prevented them from starting or completing a university education. Most students living outside major cities cross at least one checkpoint on the shortest route to their nearest university.
Last summer, Amal’s family decided they couldn’t spend another academic year in Al-Janiya, and they moved near Ramallah. “We grieve leaving our village,” Amal said, “but it’s not really a choice.”
They join more than one in ten people in the West Bank who say they’ve moved to other cities or regions because of checkpoints, along with 31 percent who say they’re considering moving for the same reason.
Technology An Inheritance of Loss
Roads that once tied Palestine together have been closed off again and again, first by militarized borders and barriers, then by permits, and finally by hundreds of checkpoints.
Khalil Tufakji, a Palestinian cartographer and expert on Israeli settlements, has watched Israel assemble this system for decades. The purpose of checkpoints is the fragmentation of space, he said—“every city closes in on itself”—and in this way, the homeland shrinks to a city.
The system that confines Palestinians was built in layers. Under British colonial rule, Palestinian communities were at times subjected to roadblocks, systemic and capricious searches, border barriers, and a system of permits that restricted who could move by vehicle across the territory.
May 1948: Nakba
1948
In 1948, in what is known as the “Nakba” or “catastrophe,” Zionist forces expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Hundreds of villages were depopulated or destroyed, and people were driven into exile.
Those who remained were placed under Israeli military rule for the next 18 years, forbidden to work, trade, study, or seek medical care beyond their towns without an Israeli permit.
1967: Six-Day War
1967
In 1967, when Israel seized the remaining Palestinian territories, it reconstructed the same permit system there. Palestinians were sorted into categories, the color of an ID card determining who may go where.
1987: 1st Intifada
1988
In 1988, UN Special Committee reports classified the closing of areas in the occupied territories as collective punishment.
1995
In 1995, the Oslo Process resumed. It was meant to lead to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. Instead, it further fragmented Palestinians by dividing the West Bank into administrative islands.
2000: 2nd Intifada
2002
By the early 2000s, this system of closures and permits had become the status quo. In 2002, Israel started building the 713-kilometers-long separation wall, 85 percent of which runs through the West Bank.
2007
And since 2007, Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza, isolating it from the rest of Palestine.
2023: Oct. 7th
2023
In the years that followed, the restrictions intensified.
This has meant that every generation of Palestinians since 1948 has inherited a smaller world than the one before it. Grandparents in Jenin, a city in the northern West Bank, tell stories about driving to have lunch in Jerusalem or a weekend in Beirut.
Parents from West Bank towns mention visiting Gaza. Their children remember school trips to Jericho’s ancient sites, to an amusement park in Tulkarm and to the zoo in Qalqilya. Most people in the West Bank today have never been to Gaza, according to the ISEP poll. Over 40 percent of respondents said they had never seen the sea, though from high points, in places like Ramallah, you can see it in the distance.
Today, people in the West Bank are living through another period of fragmentation. Three-quarters of those living in the West Bank have close relatives in other governorates. A quarter of parents said their children have never met close relatives who live in other parts of the West Bank. A generation is being locked in: Nearly a third of people under the age of 25 say they’ve never even left their own governorate.
In response to WIRED’s questions, the Israeli Military said, “Decisions regarding the placement of roadblocks, their opening or closing, are made in accordance with operational situation assessments and security considerations alone.” It is a policy that is “continuously adjusted according to the situational assessment on the ground, while balancing the residents’ ability to move freely throughout the area and security needs.”
In a letter addressed to Israel’s Central Command and top military officials, as reported by the newspaper Haaretz in June, the legal adviser to the Israeli military, Colonel Cobi Marcus, advised that the current system of checkpoints and movement obstacles has intensified beyond any legal justification. Haaretz reported he “warned” that since October 2023, the proliferation of movement restrictions, imposed on residents without authorization, may violate basic rights and the principles of international law.
Rema Hammami, an anthropologist at Birzeit University who has researched checkpoints, calls the current situation unprecedented. “Every single community, village, every single Palestinian city is going to be a separate prison. And if there’s no pushback on it, they’re just going to keep going forward with it.”
There have been military checkpoints in other parts of the world, like Sri Lanka and Iraq. But Hammami says nowhere compares to the “density, scope, and comprehensiveness” of the system in the West Bank.
Technology A Family Split
Path 60 was part of Reem Yassin’s life for 6 years. It’s the West Bank’s main highway and the primary roadway linking Ramallah, the West Bank’s political center, with Nablus, the mall of the north.
Yassin was the senior resident anesthesiologist at An-Najah National University Hospital, a prominent medical center in Nablus, which is 45 kilometers far from her home in Ramallah, in the main West Bank.
Yassin states the drive took her around 40 minutes in 2020, when she started her residency– an irritating however workable commute. After October 2023, the Israeli military set up an extra 3 checkpoints on the most direct path in between Ramallah and Nablus, and she states existing checkpoints started to close much more regularly.
When she brought to life her very first child, Yara, she would drop the infant off at her moms and dads home in ‘Asirah al-Qibliyah, a town south of Nablus, which implied she needed to travel through a various checkpoint, Al-Muraba’ ah, off Route 60.
Information analysis reveals that because October 2023, Al-Muraba’ ah has actually been among the most busy checkpoints in the West Bank, typically ending up being a chokepoint as other paths into Nablus were closed. It would consistently take chauffeurs 20 to 30 minutes to cross, however hold-ups of numerous hours weren’t unusual.
To make it work, Yassin would load the night in the past, like she was capturing a long flight: treats, a breast pump, clothing for herself and for Yara. She would leave the Ramallah house in the dark, before 6 am, to drop Yara in ‘Asirah before crossing Al-Muraba’ ah.
“I didn’t have a life anymore,” she states. “I’d go to work and see my daughter for an hour at night. The rest of the time was at the checkpoint.” She is among a 3rd of West Bank moms and dads who state that checkpoints frequently avoid them from seeing their kids throughout their waking hours.
The patterns are unforeseeable. One minute, cars and trucks pass the checkpoint without much hold-up; at another, it can take hours. Occasions that must have little bearing on West Bank movement can all of a sudden set off a lockdown. On June 13 and 14, 2025, when Israel started battle Iran, about 70 percent of checkpoints were unexpectedly closed, according to our analysis of Telegram information, a practically 350 percent boost from the week in the past.
Alexandra Rijke, a cultural geographer who invested years investigating checkpoints in the West Bank, calls unpredictability among the profession’s core systems. Not understanding whether you can go to work or school, or what will get you penalized, has a big effect on individuals’s lives. “Arbitrariness is incredibly violent,” she stated.
Yassin follows a procedure for crossing. Windows down before the soldiers ask. The script, which she can recite: “Hand over your ID. Where are you going, where are you coming from, what do you do?” In some cases the soldier holds his phone up close and takes pictures of her confront with her ID and license plate. One time, she stated, a soldier leaned in through the window: “You’re beautiful,” he stated.
She frequently saw males pushed face-down versus the hoods of their automobiles, hands behind their backs, the soldiers yelling. Often, on her method back, the exact same males are still apprehended.
When asked, almost two-thirds of individuals state embarrassment or worry most identify their sensation about checkpoints. Of individuals stopped at a checkpoint in the last 6 months, almost 40 percent stated their lorry was browsed by a soldier, and more than 20 percent stated they were physically browsed. About one in 7 stated a soldier had actually pointed a weapon towards them.
Ultimately, even dropping her child off in the early morning stopped making good sense. Yassin started remaining at her moms and dads’ home near Nablus many nights. Her spouse Montasir remained in Ramallah and gone to on some weekends. He normally left them Saturday early morning, before the inhabitant traffic on Route 60 got and checkpoints worsened.
As Yara aged, she started to ask concerns. When she opened her eyes in the early morning, she ‘d ask: “Mama, why didn’t you take us to Baba?” Due to the fact that she currently understood the response, she ‘d state, “Is the road closed?”
In the end, the checkpoints showed undue a barrier for Yassin too. The transfer to her moms and dads’ wasn’t enough. She was still losing hours at the checkpoint. After her 2nd kid was born previously this year, Yassin chose not to return to work. She extended her maternity leave and was weighing what follows: a time out, a position more detailed to home if she can discover one, possibly something abroad. “I can’t do it again,” she stated. Ever since, Yassin has actually left her task at the health center.
Technology Fatal Delays
In the summertime of July 2024, a boy from Reem Yassin’s town was shot by Israeli forces in the leg. The injury itself was not harmful. After soldiers held his ambulance at a checkpoint for nearly an hour, he got in extreme hemorrhagic shock, Yassin remembered.
Yassin, who was finishing part of her medical residency at Rafidia Surgical Hospital in Nablus, was the medical professional who got him. Acknowledged instantly by his household, she worked to support him as his high blood pressure plunged.
“We almost lost him,” Yassin remembers. “We had to keep pumping blood into him.” He made it through, thankfully, however his scenario is far from special: Nearly two-thirds of individuals in the West Bank state checkpoints have actually been a barrier to their access to healthcare.
In between October 2023 and August 2026, the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) recorded 237 gain access to rejections and 240 objective hold-ups by Israeli forces. In early 2026, events consisted of soldiers apprehending a medical team at the Sarra checkpoint, soldiers tossing an ambulance team’s secrets down a mountainside at Huwwara, and a Palestinian female in labor being moved in between lorries throughout locked gates. (In reaction to concerns on medical hold-ups, the Israeli Military stated, “In accordance with global law, the IDF permits flexibility of motion for medical lorries, consisting of ambulances, for the function of supplying medical treatment and leaving the injured.”)
These hold-ups bring deadly repercussions. The Red Crescent associates 25 deaths because 2023 to the blockage of its medical groups. In July 2026, a Palestinian baby, Ahmad Zaid, passed away after Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint obstructed the lorry carrying him for more than an hour.
In reaction, the Red Crescent has started bringing centers to individuals, developing makeshift medical points inside towns considering that ambulances are now so typically postponed and can not dependably gain access to healthcare facilities. Physicians Without Borders (MSF) likewise began supplying emergency treatment training to medical and nonmedical volunteers so they can react to immediate medical requirements in cases when an ambulance is postponed or stopped at a checkpoint.
Technology Sleeping at the Factory
After October 2023hold-up times at checkpoints throughout Nablus surged to levels beyond anywhere else in the West Bank. Commuters in Nablus invested approximately almost an hour and 50 minutes preventing checkpoints. Ali Haj Ali has actually operated at Sama Pharmaceuticals, a medication factory east of Nablus city, for over a years; now, at 37, he monitors the upkeep of the business’s assembly line. When he leaves at the end of his shift at 4:30 pm, he has actually stopped anticipating to reach his home before 8:00 pm, despite the fact that it’s just 16 kilometers away.
Some nights, he does not get home at all. He sleeps at the factory, in a plan Sama constructed throughout Covid-19: Two workplaces hold a bed and a lots bed mattress for whoever can’t make the journey home.
https://pub-ce74e6c9659b4aa18a44457c124e8a9b.r2.dev/feature/assets/sama-factory-photo-B3ZD7YoQ.webp” width=”1200″>
“My 3 kids, my spouse, my mom, my dad, I ‘d hardly see them,”he stated.”And ignore seeing pals.” This is the finest task he believes he can discover, so he keeps going.
On a current afternoon, Ali beinged in a space at Sama Pharmaceuticals, in addition to his associate, Ohood Khatatbeh. In minutes, they were filling out the information for one another, stating what they call” Nablus’checkpoint crisis”in 2024 and 2025. Ali would in some cases reach the checkpoint, sit there for hours, then simply reverse and go home.
“Nothing is guaranteed, that’s just how it is here. It’s like a lottery,” Ali stated.
Ohood, the factory’s quality control supervisor, is 38 years of ages, and the mom of 3 children. Her town, Beit Furik, is southeast of Nablus. It has a single gate, in or out. Her entire day is determined by that gate.
The town has actually needed to create its own procedure, as Ohood calls it: For every 3 personal vehicles, one shared taxi makes it through. What they can not manage is the speed, disrupted by the soldiers’ modification of shifts.
Finest case, if the Beit Furik gate is open and traffic is moving easily, the drive home can take 15 minutes. For a year and a half, it consistently took her more than 5 hours daily. On the worst day, it took 10 hours. In 2024, Ohood’s teenage kid had actually completed a last examination in biology at his school in Nablus prior to she was completing her shift. They discovered each other at the Beit Furik gate at 4:30 pm, in a line that loaded the roadway numerous cars and trucks large, all heading for the single entryway to a town of practically 16,000.
Ohood and her kid waited in line together up until 3 am the following early morning.
“The regular employee, the one not separated from work by a checkpoint,” she stated, “would be home, eaten, showered, asleep, and already dreaming, while I’m still at the checkpoint.”
Throughout the West Bank, checkpoints have actually started to improve how organizations like Sama run. The business has actually begun turning down extremely certified prospects after evaluating the checkpoints they would need to cross to get to work, Ohood stated. It’s even begun composing it into the task posts, as a requirement: Candidates need to reside in Nablus. About half of individuals surveyed stated checkpoints have actually affected their or their partner’s capability to get a task.
In late 2025, Ohood’s one-week-old infant, Aws, came down with jaundice. She and her spouse drove him out of town to the healthcare facility. On the method back, as she remembers it, they discovered the soldier currently closing the gate.
“Go back,” the soldier screamed in Arabic from the opposite of eviction in Beit Furik.
“Go back where?” her other half asked. “We have a sick child with us.”
The soldier raised his rifle and pointed it towards them. “For God’s sake,” Ohood informed her partner, “let’s just go back.” He attempted again anyhow, providing to reverse himself if the soldier would simply let Ohood and the infant cross eviction on foot. The soldier lost his mood. “I’ll shoot you,” he stated.
They reversed, the child weeping in their arms, and waited in line for an hour and a half up until the soldier opened eviction once again.
Technology A Different World
By 2000, Aref Jaber states every roadway in and out of the Jaber community in Hebron, called after his household, was sealed with earth mounds and concrete pieces. By 2010, he states, iron gates were set up and checkpoints were manned by soldiers. 3 years back, brand-new closures were set up on the extremely entryways to individuals’s homes, and iron fencing was twisted around evictions so nobody might squeeze through.
The community sits in between the Ibrahimi Mosque, the settlement stations in the old city in Hebron, and the Kiryat Arba settlement, and has just one method or out: a gate, an assessment space with digital scanning, a metal gate, and a military watchtower, called Checkpoint 160. It’s “as if we’re getting in another nation,” Jaber states of crossing it. Other than the nation on the other side is his own home.
For months after October 2023, Israeli forces enforced a curfew on the area every night, from 10 to 7 in the early morning. Now it’s every weekend, Aref stated. From Friday afternoon up until Sunday early morning, the checkpoint is closed. Nobody in, nobody out. Jaber states individuals who pass away on Sundays are fortunate, due to the fact that you can bury them the exact same day. Pass away on a Saturday, and there is absolutely nothing to be done up until the checkpoint opens once again.
The Palestinians in the area requirement to await Israeli approval for things huge and little: whether they wish to leave a client, hold a funeral service, or generate a cylinder of cooking gas. Residents cross the checkpoint on foot and climb up the hill, bring the ill, bring groceries approximately the area, dragging travel suitcases down towards the checkpoint. Jaber’s 6-year-old grand son must have the ability to go to the school 50 meters away. It now sits behind an earth mound covered in barbed wire, and reaching it would suggest a three-kilometer detour on foot, along settler-dominated roadways. Jaber waves at his cousins, who live behind the very same earth mound. “They have a whole different life there,” he states. “We’re in the closed zone.”
https://pub-ce74e6c9659b4aa18a44457c124e8a9b.r2.dev/feature/assets/SH_PRL_Nablus%20and%20Hebron-53-1600-CF9KIvZq.webp” width=”4096″> 
Even amidst the relentless pressure of apartheid, individuals can still think of a various life. On January 6, 2026, at around 3:00 pm, a Palestinian motorist approached Wadi an-Nar, the checkpoint managing the only roadway connecting the north of the occupied West Bank to the south given that 2000. He discovered something unusual. No soldiers stood in the method. The checkpoint was open. He got his phone, taped a twenty-second video, and published it in a regional Telegram channel.
Within the hour, the clip spread out through the West Bank. Everybody was puzzled. Did Israel eliminate its checkpoints? Was this actually taking place?
At 5:57, admins of the “Road Conditions” Telegram group were joking about crossing checkpoints off their lists.
At 6:10, the admins published that the soldiers had actually returned. At 6:12, they stated evictions were shut.
There was never ever a description. Some presumed it was a drill for Israeli forces. Others, merely a modification of shifts. For 3 hours, individuals enabled themselves to picture a West Bank without checkpoints. A West Bank you can drive the complete length of, 130 kilometers from north to south, in less than 2 hours.
And for a minute, they lived in a world where they might prepare the next day, the next hour. Where Amal’s children would reach their lecture halls in minutes. Where Reem would not need to quit a task to keep her household together. Where Ali would stroll through his front door before his boy went to sleep. Where Ohood would take her infant to the health center without a rifle raised at her. Where, possibly, you simply keep driving: to Haifa, to Gaza, anywhere you desire.
And Aref Jaber would stroll down his own street, past the ladders he no longer requires. He would open his front door, and be home.
Story by Lama Rabah, Sabrina Slipchenko, Charles Boutaud, Firas Tawil, Elena DeBre.
Illustration by Hokyoung Kim
Style by Sam O’Keeffe, Ben Hinks, and Alyssa Walker (WIRED), and Divya Ribeiro and Aman Bhargava (Revisual Labs).
Web advancement by Sam O’Keeffe.
Truth monitoring: Ethar AlAzem (ARIJ), Matt Giles, and Dania Suleman (WIRED).
Edited and produced by Seth Freed Wessler, Hoda Osman, Ariadne Papagapitos, Henriette Chacar, Reyhan Harmanci, and Eva Constantaras.
This story was produced in collaboration with the Palestine Reporting Lab, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), and Lighthouse Reports.
Discover more from PMN S.P.O.R.T.S - A PRIME MEDIA NETWORK BRAND
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
