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.”
