Checkpoints in the occupied West Bank choking Palestinian life, warns UN expert- – Israel’s expanding system of checkpoints, road gates and other movement restrictions in the occupied West Bank is fragmenting Palestinian territory and aggravating the arbitrary system of control that costs Palestinians time, livelihoods, education and lives, a UN expert warned today.

Fact Sheet Israeli Checkpoints in the West Bank Palestine 2026  https://www.ochaopt.org/sites/default/files/Factsheet_Movement_and_Access_April_2026_1.pdf

 

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https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/10/checkpoints-occupied-west-bank-choking-palestinian-life-warns-un-expert  

 02 October 2026

GENEVA – Israel’s expanding system of checkpoints, road gates and other movement restrictions in the occupied West Bank is fragmenting Palestinian territory and aggravating the arbitrary system of control that costs Palestinians time, livelihoods, education and lives, a UN expert warned today.

“Arbitrariness itself becomes a form of torment when every journey, every appointment and every family visit depends on whether a gate is open or a soldier allows passage,” said Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.

“Numbers alone cannot capture what this system inflicts. It steals hours and days from people’s lives, separates families, deprives students of education and workers of livelihoods and obstructs access to life-saving health care.”

Highlighting one case among hundreds, the Special Rapporteur said that in July 2026, four-month-old Ahmed Zaid died after Israeli soldiers prevented his family from reaching an ambulance waiting beyond a military checkpoint for more than an hour. “Ahmed’s death is a devastating illustration of what this system means in human terms,” Albanese said. “For millions of Palestinians, reaching work, school, university, hospital or family can take hours, involve being rerouted without warning or become altogether impossible.”

As of December 2025, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented 925 checkpoints and other obstacles restricting the movement of some 3.4 million Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem – the highest number in 20 years, and 43 per cent above the average of the preceding two decades.

Recent investigations reviewed by the mandate, drawing on on-the-ground reporting, surveys of hundreds of Palestinians, satellite imagery and billions of GPS data points, show that this choking regime has only intensified. Since October 2023, delays around Nablus have surged beyond levels recorded anywhere else in the West Bank. In Beit Furik, a town of nearly 16,000 people with a single gate, a 15-minute drive routinely took more than five hours, and up to 10 hours on the worst days. About half of those surveyed said checkpoints had affected their own or their spouse’s ability to find work.

The Special Rapporteur pointed to an unmistakable link between the proliferation of checkpoints and the rapidly deteriorating situation across the West Bank: settler terror, accelerating settlement expansion, demolitions, forced displacement and the deliberate destruction of Palestinian agricultural life.

“Palestinian communities are increasingly being transformed into isolated enclaves – separate cells of a long-exposed carceral regime, connected or disconnected at the whim of the occupying power,” she said. “The checkpoints are not isolated inconveniences. The checkpoint system is unlawful, as is the occupation from which it emanates.”

In its July 2024 Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice found that Israeli policies had fragmented the West Bank, severed East Jerusalem from it and encircled Palestinian communities in enclaves, obstructing the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

“The international community’s unforgivable delay in giving effect to the Court’s demand that Israel’s unlawful presence end ‘as rapidly as possible’ is a hallmark of complicity.”

“This system of fragmentation and control must end,” Albanese said. “Palestinians must be able to move freely across their own land, live together as a people and exercise their right to self-determination.”

*Francesca Albanese is the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967

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Israel’s expanding network of checkpoints is UNLAWFUL and must be dismantled immediately. Part of the carceral geography of apartheid, it makes Palestiniams' daily life fully dependent on arbitrariness. Thank you @WIRED for exposing this viciousnes: "Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family. Lost lives. How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank. CHOKE POINTS "

https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/2107786279320482146 

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt

@FranceskAlbs

 

Israel’s expanding network of checkpoints is UNLAWFUL and must be dismantled immediately. 

Part of the carceral geography of apartheid, it makes Palestiniams' daily life fully dependent on arbitrariness.  

Thank you @WIRED for exposing this viciousness:  https://www.wired.com/story/how-israeli-checkpoints-choke-palestinian-life-occupied-west-bank/

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Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family.

Lost lives.

How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank.

CHOKE POINTS  

The Big Story

Sep 30, 2026 6:00 AM

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... READ MORE  https://www.wired.com/story/how-israeli-checkpoints-choke-palestinian-life-occupied-west-bank/

The violence and the creation of new outposts are two different aspects of settlement activity, but together they show how illegal settlement expansion is occurring not only through established communities and government planning, but also through new activity on the ground.... Animated map shows spread of illegal Israeli settlements across Palestine

An aerial view of the illegal Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim in the occupied West Bank, on June 29, 2020 [Ilan Rosenberg/Reuters] 

  

Settlements are illegal under international law as they violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bans an occupying power from transferring its population to the area it occupies.

Animated map shows spread of illegal Israeli settlements across Palestine

Some 750,000 settlers live across more than 500 illegal settlements and outposts, as Israeli pogroms hit record highs.

Over the past six decades, the settlement network has grown from scattered hilltop outposts into a sprawling system of settlements, roads and highways binding them to each other and to Israel.

According to Peace Now, an Israeli anti-settlement watchdog, there are at least 148 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and 15 in occupied East Jerusalem, 163 in total, now home to some 750,000 Israelis, roughly 10 percent of the country’s Jewish population.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/14/animated-map-shows-spread-of-illegal-israeli-settlements-across-palestine 

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Israeli settler violence and escalating Israeli military operations alongside severe movement restrictions, demolitions and widespread displacement “have eroded Palestinian livelihoods and contributed to increased food insecurity...”

© WFP/Hugh Rutherford A family eat lunch in the Bedouin community of Umm Al Khair, West Bank.

Food aid cutback in the occupied West Bank as health fears grow in Gaza

1 September 2026 Humanitarian Aid

Lack of funding has forced the World Food Programme (WFP) to slash aid to families in the West Bank by half even though needs have more than doubled over the past two years.

“We’re running out of funding, and that means that from today, some 200,000 people will lose access to critical assistance,” Shaun Hughes, WFP country director for Palestine, told journalists in Geneva on Tuesday.

He said intensified settler violence and escalating Israeli military operations alongside severe movement restrictions, demolitions and widespread displacement “have eroded Palestinian livelihoods and contributed to increased food insecurity”.

Pushed to the brink

At the same time, a crippling economic crisis “is pushing people to breaking point”, with unemployment more than doubling and over a third of the population struggling to meet their basic needs.

“Food may be available in the markets, but people simply cannot afford it,” he said, speaking from London.

Today, nearly a million people across the West Bank – over a quarter of the population – are now food insecure, he said, adding that “two years ago, that figure was 11 per cent.”

Families ‘in a chokehold’

During recent visits to the territory, Mr. Hughes saw families that used to earn a living from the land “now forced from their homes, their livelihoods destroyed” and facing incredible injustice and hardship.

“They now find themselves in a chokehold, unable to move freely to access land or jobs and so unable to afford food for their families,” he said.

In response to journalists’ questions, he said that the West Bank was not traditionally considered to be experiencing a food crisis, but that increasing pressures were exacerbating food insecurity. 

He added that the very small cash transfers that WFP provided – about 50 shekels per person per month (less than $20) – had become a “real lifeline” for many people and would now be cut off due to the funding shortfall.

Gaza: Don’t look away

Turning to the Gaza Strip, Mr. Hughes said that WFP was also forced to reduce its cash assistance to 75,000 families in July. 

He stressed that the recent slight improvements in food security indicators reported last month “should not create a false sense of security” as two thirds of the population still face critical and emergency levels of hunger. 

He warned that if humanitarian food aid does not continue, “up to 90 per cent of the population will face high levels of acute food insecurity by the end of this year.”

WFP requires $386 million to avoid any further reductions in assistance provided in Gaza and the West Bank over the next six months, he said, urging continued international support and solidarity.

“As global crises multiply and domestic fiscal interests take over, there is a real danger that the world’s attention moves on from Palestine, but the needs of Palestinians, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, have not moved on,” he said.

“Now is not the time to look away.”... READ MORE https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/09/1168237

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Even during the ceasefire, Palestinians in #Gaza continue to face daily threats from unexploded ordnance left behind by the fighting. Overall, about 82% of the structures in Gaza – about 200,000 buildings – are damaged.

© UNICEF/Eyad El Baba A nine-year-old girl outside her damaged home in Nuseirat camp in central Gaza.

 Gaza: Destruction of buildings rises by nearly 10 per cent since ceasefire

 https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/08/1168138

13 August 2026 Peace and Security

New satellite assessments show the destruction of buildings in Gaza has climbed by nearly 10 per cent since October’s faltering ceasefire between Hamas and Israeli forces aim to end the two-year war, which reduced cities to rubble and displaced more than one million people, UN agencies said on Thursday.

Even with the guns largely silent, Palestinians in Gaza continue to face daily threats from unexploded ordnance left behind by the fighting.

Key points

• UN agencies are struggling with shortages of fuel and other essential items
• Teenager injured by unexploded ordnance
• Aid efforts underway include mine action, summer school and food package distribution

At least three Israeli airstrikes have been reported since Wednesday, including one near Al Amal Hospital in Khan Younis earlier on Thursday, UN Associate Spokesperson Daniela Gross told reporters.

"Airstrikes on populated areas in Gaza risk increasing harm to civilians," the UN aid coordination office (OCHA) warned.

Meanwhile, a 13-year-old was injured by explosive ordnance earlier this week in northern Gaza.

Explosive hazard threats         

Against a landscape of rubble, the threat of explosive hazards is ever present in the shattered enclave.

More than 15,000 people participated in awareness-raising sessions related to explosive ordnance last week alone, and mine action partners have carried out 18 assessments to pave the way for rubble removal, the setting up of new shelters and the resumption of farming.

“While our partners still lack the permissions and equipment to remove explosive ordnance safely, they are also helping protect people by marking hazards and by educating civilians on how to beware of explosive items,” Ms. Gross said.

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More buildings destroyed

A new assessment by the UN Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) estimated that the number of destroyed structures across Gaza has increased by nine per cent since the declaration of a ceasefire in October 2025, according to the latest situation update the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNWRA. 

Since the ceasefire, UNRWA has received “reports of demolitions affecting schools and other UN facilities in areas under Israeli military control, however, these reports could not be independently verified due to ongoing access restrictions”, the UN agency said.

Overall, about 82 per cent of the structures – about 200,000 buildings – in Gaza are damaged, with two thirds of them destroyed, UNRWA said.

Prolonged shortages

UN agencies and partners are facing mounting challenges that are affecting the delivery of essential services across Gaza, choking humanitarian movement and operational capacity.

“The prolonged shortage of lubricant oil and other critical supplies required to maintain generators, vehicles and operational equipment is placing additional strain on already overstretched service delivery systems,” UNRWA said.

The situation risks of disruptions to health, education and other lifesaving interventions amid persistently high levels of need, the agency said.

Aid efforts continue

Finding safe shelter also continues to be a challenge.

Aid partners provided more than 3,300 households with emergency shelters and other items last week. 

The provisions included nearly 500 new tents, a similar number of tarpaulins, thousands of bedding items and thousands of solar lanterns to keep people safer at night.

Despite robust efforts, more support is needed to serve the recovering population of Gaza, according to Ms. Gross, who said “more funding is needed as well as approvals to bring in longer-lasting shelter items”.

Here’s a snapshot of other ongoing efforts:

• From 1 to 9 August, UN partners provided monthly food assistance to nearly 60,000 households, each receiving three parcels and one 25-kg flour bag, which is enough to cover more than 100 per cent of people’s minimum caloric needs.
• With UN partner support, every day about 100 kitchens prepare 700,000 meals served at more than 1,000 locations, and over two dozen subsidised bakeries produce roughly 100,000 two-kg bread bundles for people in need
• A new UNRWA temporary learning space opened in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on 10 August, and its summer learning activities have reached 41,849 children between 3 and 9 August

Learn more about how the UN is helping ordinary Gazans here.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/08/1168138 

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"My suffering, though severe, was never compounded by denial. The world around me was structured to keep me alive. That distinction matters. Because elsewhere, at this very moment, there are people whose hunger is not the byproduct of illness—but the result of policy. Of decision. Of design. In Gaza, and within the walls of Israeli prisons, hunger is not incidental. It is imposed..." Hunger, By Design By Mike Odetalla

Mike Hanini Odetalla

Hunger, By Design
By Mike Odetalla

At the height of my cancer treatment, I lost 60 pounds in less than two months.
Not by choice. Not by neglect. But because I simply could not eat.

Every swallow felt like fire. Every attempt at nourishment became a negotiation with pain. My body, once familiar, began to disappear before my own eyes—reduced not by lack of food, but by my inability to take it in. I didn't recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror.

And yet, even in that darkest stretch, one truth remained constant:

Food was there.

It sat within reach. Prepared. Available. Waiting for me, even when I could not accept it. Doctors urged me. Nurses monitored me. My suffering, though severe, was never compounded by denial. The world around me was structured to keep me alive.

That distinction matters.

Because elsewhere, at this very moment, there are people whose hunger is not the byproduct of illness—but the result of policy. Of decision. Of design.

In Gaza, and within the walls of Israeli prisons, hunger is not incidental. It is imposed.

There, food is not something a patient struggles to swallow—it is something withheld. Rations are restricted. Access is controlled. Malnutrition spreads not because bodies fail, but because systems ensure they do.

I know what it feels like to weaken. To feel your strength slip quietly away. To measure your days not in hours, but in ounces lost and energy drained.

But I also know this: My suffering existed within a system trying—however imperfectly—to save me.

Theirs exists within a system that does not. 

That is the difference between illness and injustice.

Between misfortune and intention.

Between hunger… and hunger used as a weapon.

And once you understand that distinction, you cannot unsee it.

 https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10165923688376977&set=a.10150390714236977

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