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Lama Rabah, Sabrina Slipchenko, Charles Boutaud, Firas Tawil, and Elena DeBre.
30 September 2026
Illustration: Lina Jaradat
An 18-month data investigation reveals how Israel’s system of movement restrictions on Palestinian movement in the occupied West Bank has expanded through 942 obstacles, which include checkpoints, gates, earth mounds and concrete blocks. The investigation measures what this system does to daily life: hours taken from Palestinians’ lives every day, families separated, obstructing access to work, education and healthcare.
The investigation was produced in a collaboration between Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), the Palestine Reporting Lab, Lighthouse Reports, WIRED magazine, and Evident. It draws on an unprecedented analysis of data from multiple sources, including thousands of Telegram, over two billion GPS location pins, satellite imagery, along with field reporting and an exclusive survey.
Aref Jaber is on a neighbor’s roof, trying to get home.
At 51, he is clambering over a wall into the next backyard, up onto the next roof, along the line of stone houses that stand between him and his own front door. He has no choice. Alleys and side streets in his neighborhood have been sealed with cement blocks and barbed wire, and a single point of access, called Checkpoint 160, is the only way in or out for the 140 families who live there.
But Checkpoint 160 is closed again; Jaber is not sure why. The whim of a soldier, a crash in the scanning system, breaking news in the region—it could be anything.
For the last three years, he says, this has happened at least two days a week. So the community has devised a system of alternative routes. Jaber calls his neighbors to ask if he can come through. They check their windows for soldiers, and then Jaber scales ladders and traverses roofs. “When I finally get home,” he says, “it feels like I’ve achieved something monumental.”
The enclosure of Jaber’s neighborhood is a dense microcosm of what life is becoming across the occupied West Bank—for Palestinians, that is. At the same time that deadly Israeli settler violence robs communities in the West Bank of their land, and amid the genocide in Gaza, Israel has expanded its infrastructures of military control and domination.
Since 2023, Israel’s fragmentation of Palestine, underway for generations, has accelerated. The West Bank has, for the nearly 3.5 million Palestinians who live there, ceased to exist as a contiguous territory. According to the most recent UN data from December 2025, at least 925 fixed and temporary checkpoints, metal gates, roadblocks, and earth mounds divide the West Bank. (A Palestinian governmental commission reported this month that the number is now 942.) This fracturing has torn families apart, stifled the economy, and obstructed access to essential services such as hospitals and schools.
Israel has never publicly listed the checkpoints it operates, their staffing hours, or their closure times. On the ground, Google Maps is practically useless for Palestinians; it is blind to the checkpoints and tries to route drivers onto roads reserved for Israeli-plated cars. Instead, citizens have developed their own ad hoc networks to inform each other of closures.
As far as we know, no organization has used that network—combined with new datasets and on-the-ground reporting—to measure what this does to daily life.
Over 18 months, WIRED, Lighthouse Reports, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) and the Palestine Reporting Lab investigated the system that has carved the West Bank into cantons and measured what it cost people to move through it.
We analyzed tens of thousands of Telegram messages Palestinians sent to navigate daily checkpoint delays and closures
حوارة مغلق البديل عورتا و لكنها أزمة
📍 Huwwara is closed, the alternative is Awarta, but it’s congested
عورتا أزمة خانقة الآن. حاجز المربعة سالك
📍 Awarta is severely congested now. Al-Muraba’ah checkpoint is open
حاجز المربعة أزمة
📍 Al-Muraba’ah checkpoint is congested now
Working with the Institute for Social and Economic Progress (ISEP), a Palestinian research organization, we polled hundreds of people across the West Bank to find out how checkpoints shape their lives.
We mapped 2.6 billion GPS pings of drivers navigating the roads and closures.
Then, we manually verified over 800 movement obstacles using satellite imagery and on-the-ground reporting. Explore and download the full map of verified checkpoints here.
The number of movement obstacles in the West Bank rose by more in the past three years than it did over the previous 18.
The average West Bank commuter—someone who drives several times a week—loses about an hour and a half each week to additional travel time in an effort to avoid checkpoints. Over the course of a year, that amounts to 77 hours lost.
For some, the delays are far longer. People going from Ramallah to Al-Eizariya, on the edges of Jerusalem, could do so in 27 kilometers/48 minutes. Instead, it’s 45 kilometers/100 minutes.
Our data shows that people have to take all sorts of complex routes to avoid checkpoints.
Using the median route taken in our dataset, someone who commutes back and forth four days a week would lose nearly seven hours in additional travel time every week.
Anyone who commutes four days a week from Ramallah to Hebron is robbed of over 12 extra hours of travel time.
One pair of towns, Anabta and Beit Lid, are 8 kilometers apart.
It used to be a 10 minute drive. It now routinely takes 50 minutes each way.
Losing Access to an Education
More than a decade ago, Amal and her family left the US. They moved back to a home in Al-Janiya, where they built a house with a garden, and a mountain view. “Mashallah,” she says of it still. (The names have been changed due to safety concerns.)
By the time the family arrived, Al-Janiya’s main entrance had already been closed for over a decade. Israel sealed the eastern road in 2003; it now serves as an entrance to Talmon, an Israeli settlement built on the village’s land.