Palestinians in the occupied West Bank know they shouldn’t ask what time their loved ones are going to make it home.
There’s simply no way to give an accurate answer. What used to be a short ride from one place to another could now take hours, or it might not happen at all.
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Before driving, Palestinians check dedicated WhatsApp and Telegram groups and channels where people share updates on road conditions. But this isn’t typical traffic news: Instead, chats focus on which Israeli military checkpoints are open, which roads are off limits to Palestinians and whether Israeli settlers are attacking Palestinians as they drive their vehicles.
Sometimes pins are sent to warn people driving near towns where Israeli forces are conducting raids.
And if there’s no time to check the groups, then there’s always Basma FM. The Palestinian radio station, based in Rawabi near Ramallah, carries three traffic updates per hour.
The channel started broadcasting on October ۲, ۲۰۲۳ – just days before the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October ۷ and the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and what has become a pogrom against Palestinians in the West Bank.
“Our idea was to target young people. We wanted to offer entertainment and culture news. But five days later, we realised we couldn’t,” said Fatima Barqawi, Basma FM’s news and traffic director.
The team had originally planned traffic updates as part of their programming. “We thought we could tell parents picking up their children from school to know where there was traffic, but after the war on Gaza started, we had to shift focus,” Barqawi said.
Her department has seven employees who verify information with their sources and provide updates on roadblocks.
“Things change each second. We could say there’s a closed checkpoint and Israeli soldiers decide to reopen it. Or vice versa,” Barqawi explained.
Dangers on the roads
The issue for Palestinians driving through the West Bank isn’t simply being late for appointments or held up for hours – it’s that there is an inherent danger to travelling in the occupied territory.
Palestinians in the West Bank drive white-plated vehicles, making them easily identifiable compared to the yellow-plated cars driven by Israeli settlers.
Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians near checkpoints after claiming they were conducting ramming attacks, and Israeli settlers often attack Palestinian cars or block them from using certain highways.
These attacks are increasing as illegal Israeli settlements grow at a record pace.
It is hard to miss the large infrastructure projects Israel is implementing, expanding highways to connect Israeli settlements to one another and to Israel. This ends up isolating Palestinian communities, often forcing Palestinians to use poorly paved roads or dangerous mountainous routes to avoid Israeli settlers and roadblocks.
It’s a journey of fear and anxiety, a young Palestinian woman who did not wish to be named told Al Jazeera. “I used to blast my music and drive, now I’m on high alert. Always on edge.”
The woman recounted how Israeli soldiers assaulted her fiancé near a checkpoint in Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank, because they mistakenly thought he had passed without stopping. A year later, she said, a soldier pointed his rifle at her.
“He was shouting at me. The sun was blocking my view, and I was careful crossing the checkpoint but that wasn’t enough. I saw the green beam [from the gun] and thought that was the end,” she said.
Attacks at checkpoints
Many Palestinians report being assaulted, humiliated and sometimes arrested at these checkpoints and roadblocks.
Israel has long imposed movement restrictions on Palestinians, controlling the road system and Palestinians’ access to the wider world. But since the war on Gaza began, these restrictions have intensified.
As of December ۲۰۲۵, the United Nations documented ۹۲۵ barriers across the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem, a ۴۳ percent increase over the ۲۰-year annual average of ۶۴۷, the UN’s humanitarian affairs agency, OCHA, reported.
Almost all of of the villages and cities in the West Bank have iron gates at their entrances, and Israeli forces close them arbitrarily. Some of the gates are only open during certain hours.
A new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said the restrictions are used to deliberately fragment Palestinian life, with roadblocks and military checkpoints cutting off people from their work, schools, hospitals and one another.
The report, titled The Elimination Project, says there’s a broad rapid and systematic Israeli assault in the West Bank that aims to dismantle the foundations of Palestinian existence, and road closures are just one of them.
That is why, as Heba Erkat prepared her notes before heading into the studio for Basma FM’s Wednesday afternoon bulletin, she knew the information about to be read out could change rapidly.
Her colleague read the news, and then Erkat started listing updates at ۶۱ checkpoints across the West Bank.
It was a relatively good day: only ۱۲ of the checkpoints were either closed or had long queues.
But, as Erkat noted at the end of the segment, “the situation changes by the minute”.
