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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“Consider what we didn’t do,” said [Ben] Rhodes. “I sometimes am haunted by this. The trillions of dollars spent on a forever war: what could that have been spent on? Climate change, universal healthcare, public education. There’s a real opportunity cost to how we chose to spend our time and resources."

‘The initial heroism, goodwill and unity of 9/11 gave way to discord at home and diminished moral authority abroad.’ Illustration: Guardian Design

 

Mistakes, mistrust and misdirection: 25 years after 9/11, its dark legacy continues to unfold

The world’s most powerful country responded to the worst terrorist attack in its history by inflicting terror of its own – around the world, and at home

David Smith in Washington

Fri 11 Sep 2026

As clear as that cloudless September morning, Jenna Jacobs McPartland remembers the moment everything changed. “I was cleaning the bathroom and watching the Today show in the background and nine months pregnant,” the 52-year-old recalls by phone. “I think they were showing ‘Today throws a wedding’ when the news broke in.”

A plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. McPartland did not know that her husband, Ariel Jacobs, was attending a conference at its Windows on the World restaurant. “I called his office to say, ‘Hey, turn on the TV. Do you guys know what’s going on?’ His assistant said, ‘Oh my God, Jenna, he’s there.’ The whole world disappeared and there was this sort of hollow collapsing feeling.”

Ariel Jacobs did not live to see his son... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/11/september-11-dark-legacy 

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TIME: The Solemn History Behind Nakba Day ... From 1947 to 1949, 531 towns were destroyed by Israeli militias- Of the 1.4 million-strong Palestinian population at the time, 800,000 were displaced; the massacres of families and towns left enduring scars on the survivors.

Arab refugees, mostly women and children, from a village near Haifa begin a three mile hike carrying large bundles of personal possessions to the Arab lines in Tulkarim, West Bank, on June 26, 1948.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

by Juwayriah Wright

Wright is an Editorial Producer for TIME.

Every year on May 15, Palestinian people across the world observe what is known as Nakba Day, the solemn anniversary of the day in 1948 when the Arab-Israeli War began, precipitating a wave of displacement and expulsion among the Palestinian population. This year, with more than 450,000 people—nearly a quarter of Gaza’s population—newly displaced in just the past week, the commemoration of the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” takes on new significance.

For those who observe it, Nakba Day is not only a day for mourning, but for a sense of re-establishment. Although it is annually remembered, the event has historical nuances and driving forces that can contribute to an understanding of the current events in Gaza. 

What is commemorated on Nakba Day?

Political Zionism—the movement to create a Jewish state—dates back to the 19th century, but the persecution of Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s and the horrors of the Holocaust helped drive a massive migration in that decade of 60,000 Jews to what was then known as Mandatory Palestine, the British-controlled land that was ... READ MORE  https://time.com/6978612/nakba-day-history/

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Time: Imagining a Free Palestine by Ahmad Ibsais, a first-generation Palestinian American who writes the newsletter State of Siege.

A woman waving the Palestinian flag- Getty

“Where is Ahmad?” The soldier called my name while we were stopped at the last Israeli checkpoint on the way from Ramallah to Jerusalem. I am a Palestinian American. But once I’m in my ancestral homeland, I’m not an American in the eyes of Israeli authorities. I am simply Palestinian, denied the basic right to movement and pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

For too long, Palestinians in the diaspora, like myself, became travelers on our soil. We tried to forget the realities of occupation in the West Bank, and that a few hours south in Gaza our brothers and sisters suffered under even more inhumane conditions.

Now, a reawakening has occurred. It has been six months since Oct. 7, and I’m closer to understanding the catastrophe that my people endured in 1948: children, no older than six or seven, sleeping huddled on muddied floors, under tents in which their lives as refugees began. Children who are slowly freezing to death as bombs rain down upon them. Children who have endured more than I ever have. In that continuous grief of watching my people from afar in my home in Michigan, I have rediscovered what it means to be Palestinian, and, like millions of us, reimagined what a Palestinian future looks like.

In the last few months, we have seen a rise in global Palestinian solidarity and resistance, yet the hardships mounted against Palestinians only seems to grow—during Ramadan and Easter, Palestinian Muslims and Christians could not practice their faith in peace neither in Gaza nor the West Bank, as the bodies pile up...    READ MORE       https://time.com/6967434/imagining-free-palestine/ 

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Space, Time, Dignity, Rights: Improving Palestine refugee camps

Photos

Below is a selection of photos to be displayed at the exhibition. Photographers have agreed to reproduction of photos by media outlets for the purpose of this exhibition.

View over Dheisheh refugee camp, West Bank / Armin Linke
Over the last 60 years, Palestine refugee camps have developed from temporary tent cities into complex living environments.

Narrow alleyway in Burj Barajneh refugee camp, Lebanon / Ismail Sheikh Hassan
Many Palestine refugee camps have turned into densely populated, hyper-urbanised settings.

Talbieh refugee camp, Jordan / UNRWA Archives
Children play on a self-made swing in Jordan’s Talbieh refugee camp.

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http://reliefweb.int/node/492671

occupied Palestinian territory

and 3 others

Space, Time, Dignity, Rights: Improving Palestine refugee camps

Report

—

UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East

Berlin / Jerusalem

Between international politics and everyday life, transition and continuity, waiting room and home. Against the backdrop of these contradictions, today, roughly one-third of the nearly five million Palestine refugees served by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) live in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Over a period of more than 60 years, temporary tent cities have developed into complex living environments, some of which rank among the densest urban environments in the world. Congested and poverty-stricken, they reflect the extraordinary resilience and agency of the refugees who inhabit them. The exhibition, which will be shown at Deutsches Architektur Zentrum (DAZ) from 9 May to 3 June 2012, not only displays the projects of the infrastructure and camp improvement programme of UNRWA, but provides insights into a new culture of joint planning with refugees which has emerged and fundamentally influenced all those involved.

Motivated by a sense of urgency with regard to the extreme poverty, congestion, and deteriorating environment embodied by many refugee camps, UNRWA and host governments met with representatives of refugees and the donor community for the 2004 Geneva Conference in order to target worsening living conditions in camps. UNRWA used the new window of opportunity created by the Geneva Conference to set up the infrastructure and camp improvement programme (ICIP) in order to engage with these issues.

Since 2007, BMZ has supported UNRWA with the development of this programme. This involves improving, in a holistic, methodical and comprehensive manner, the refugee camps’ physical and social environment through the introduction of a participatory, community-driven planning approach. The Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH is advising UNRWA ICIP with this innovative methodology on behalf of BMZ.

The exhibition “Space, Time, Dignity, Rights” includes four installations that give insight into how participants in camp improvement projects in the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon seek to balance their refugee identity and political rights with their day-to-day needs as residents of congested and impoverished camps. In this process, they deal with questions such as:

• Should refugee camps have public spaces?
• Is the sense of belonging to a street or neighbourhood within a refugee camp an identity worth preserving?
• How can individual choices be balanced vis-à-vis the interest of the entire refugee community—including the right to refuse to participate in camp improvement?

The result is a radical reconceptualisation of what constitutes a “refugee camp”. Rather than being a space associated with structural discrimination, it is considered a space where inhabitants can and should live with dignity - which goes hand in hand with the international community's continued support of Palestine refugees until their plight is solved in a just and lasting manner, in accordance with UN resolutions.

The exhibition, which will be shown at Deutsches Architektur Zentrum DAZ from 9 May to 3 June 2012, will be officially opened by Dirk Niebel, Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, and Filippo Grandi, UNRWA Commissioner-General, on 8 May at 7:00 p.m. The event will also include a panel discussion.

On the following day, 9 May 2012, the exhibition’s topic will be further explored during an all-day academic conference, organised in cooperation with the University of Stuttgart, Chair of International Urbanism. Internationally-renowned academics, development experts and representatives of United Nations organisations and the German government have been invited to reflect upon the methodology of the infrastructure and camp improvement programme.

Refugee camp urbanisation in an international context as well as participatory planning approaches will be discussed by experts such as Michel Agier (EHESS), Patrick Coulombel (Emergency Architects), Mannoucher Lolachi (UNHCR) and Dania Rifai (UN Habitat).
This exhibition has been made possible by the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) / Regional Social and Cultural Fund for Palestinian Refugees and Gaza Population. Curatorial director of the exhibition is Prof. Philipp Misselwitz, University of Stuttgart, Chair of International Urbanism. Co-operation partner is the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum (DAZ) in Berlin.

For more information about the exhibition in general, the opening event and the academic conference, please visit: www.space-time-dignity-rights.com