Chokepoints: Suffocating the West Bank
Co-published with
September 30, 2026
How we quantified and mapped the full impact of Israel’s invisible and accelerating web of checkpoints on the 3.5mn Palestinians forcibly trapped within it.
There are 942 Israeli military checkpoints, gates and barriers across the occupied West Bank today. At just over 5,600 sq km, the West Bank, comparable in size to the US State of Delaware or the Madrid Metropolitan area, has ceased to exist as a contiguous territory.
A massive web of movement restrictions and control that is reshaping lives – fragmenting families, closing off towns and preventing access to jobs, education and healthcare.
Invisible to the outside world, this system is core to Israel’s accelerating infrastructure of control over Palestinian lives. Together with our partners at the Palestine Reporting Lab, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), WIRED and Evident, we set out to quantify its effects and understand the consequences for communities.
We found that checkpoints have imprisoned a generation: nearly a third of people under the age of 25 say they have never even left their own district. A journey between neighbouring towns that should take ten minutes can take an hour. Collectively, West Bank residents lose about 30 years worth of time every day. That’s 77 hours stolen from each individual, per year.
This infrastructure enables Israel to control movement not just in and out of the territory, but also within it. Some cities, like Sinjil, are almost entirely enclosed by barbed wire and earthmounds, sealing in its 7,000 residents. Of Sinjil’s six access roads, only one entry point was passable at any point since 2023. Even the checkpoint on the sole passable road is closed at times.
METHODS
Israel has never publicly listed the checkpoints it operates, their staffing hours, closure times or when roads will be blocked off. Satellite data is almost non-existent and popular navigation apps, like Google maps, do not list checkpoints and are essentially unusable for Palestinians. To navigate this reality, Palestinians have created an ad-hoc system using Telegram and other messaging services to update each other on congestion and checkpoint status, and share checkpoint updates like weather reports on the radio.
This made mapping and analysis challenging. We built a novel dataset using UN OCHA maps, tens of thousands of Telegram messages and 2.6 billion GPS pings of vehicles that travel across the West Bank. With the Palestinian Institute for Social and Economic Progress, we conducted polls of over 1000 people about their experience.
The result is the most comprehensive dataset to-date on the Israeli military’s system of movement restrictions, the first map with GPS coordinates of checkpoints and a set of findings that illuminate and quantify the violence of their unpredictability.
KEY FINDINGS
Locked in: At the time of publication, Israel imposed a week-long “comprehensive closure” of the West Bank. During the 12-day war with Iran in June 2025, around 70 percent of checkpoints were closed, bringing life in the West Bank to a standstill.
Lost time: Average delays have increased by more than 50 percent since 2023 with waits frequently exceeding hours at a time. Detours cost commuters about 90 minutes each week. The average commuter loses about an hour and a half each week taking more roundabout routes. This additional travel time amounts to 77 hours lost per commuter, per year..
Destroying the Fabric of Society: 94 percent of West Bank residents said there was a checkpoint or gate separating them from close relatives and nearly all of these people said that visits with these relatives have become rarer as a result. A quarter of parents say that checkpoints have meant their children haven’t met close relatives who live in other towns. 69 percent of people polled reported cancelling social or family visits because of checkpoints.
Limiting access to Education: 30 percent of people polled said that checkpoints have impacted their ability to start or complete a university education. One in ten people have moved or thought of moving to because of checkpoints
Blocking Access to Essential Services: Nearly two thirds of people say checkpoints have been a barrier to their access to medical care. One in five communities had at least one more checkpoint on the most direct route to a hospital in 2025 than in 2023. A third of communities now cross at least three checkpoints to reach a hospital.
STORYLINES
For the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) checkpoints delays and closures carry fatal consequences. PRCS attributes 25 deaths since 2023 to the obstruction of its medical teams. Between October 2023 and August 2026 they documented 237 access denials and 240 mission delays by Israeli forces. In July 2026, a Palestinian infant, Ahmad Zaid, died after Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint reportedly blocked the vehicle transporting him for more than an hour.
Ali Haj Ali has worked at Sama Pharmaceuticals, a medicine factory east of Nablus city, for over a decade. Today, he supervises the maintenance of the company’s production lines. When he leaves at the end of his shift at 4:30 pm, he has stopped expecting to reach his home before 8:00 pm, even though it’s only 16 kilometers away. Some nights, he doesn’t get home at all. He sleeps at the factory. Two offices hold a bed and a dozen mattresses for whomever can’t make the trip home.
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.
In Nablus, the West Bank’s commercial capital and home to major universities and hospitals, the number of checkpoints increased by 28 percent from 2023-2025 and delay times spiked to levels beyond anywhere else in the West Bank. Commuters in Nablus spent an average of nearly an hour and 50 minutes of additional travel time to avoid checkpoints.