GENEVA, October 2, 2026 (WAFA) – 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 on Friday.
“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.”
K.F.
