JERUSALEM, February 20, 2025 (WAFA) – Israeli occupation forces Thursday sealed off the Beit Iksa checkpoint, northwest of the occupied West Bank city of Jerusalem, according to the villagers.

They said that the occupying forces closed down the permanently staffed checkpoint, located down the internal road that connects Road 436 to the Iksa House, denying the villagers, even patients, access into and out of the village.

This forced hundreds of passengers to endure lengthy delays at the checkpoint for hours.

Israel, the occupying power, has constructed a section of the apartheid wall around Beit Iksa, isolating large swaths of the village land, preventing landowners from accessing their land, and pushing the village into a crowded enclave isolated from the rest of the West Bank cities.

Israel severely restricts Palestinians’ freedom of movement within the occupied West Bank through a complex combination of approximately 500 fixed checkpoints, hundreds of flying checkpoints, settler-only roads, over 200 military bases, and various other physical obstructions.

Closures besides other measures, taken under the guise of security, are intended to entrench Israel’s 58-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and its settler colonial project which it enforces with routine and frequently deadly violence against Palestinians.

K.F.