Before leaving home for work or travelling to a university in another town, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are now used to checking their phones for road updates.
Telegram groups dedicated to traffic throughout the occupied West Bank have become part of daily life, with Palestinian residents sharing information about open and closed checkpoints, where traffic congestion and what alternative routes exist.
The status of a single checkpoint can change several times within minutes, as Israeli closures increasingly sever roads between West Bank cities and villages—a trend which has escalated since Israel launched its war on Gaza on 7 October 2023.
The Israeli military's announcement that it would seal off all land crossings into the occupied West Bank on Tuesday 27 October, the day of Israel's elections, has once again drawn attention to Israel's restrictions over Palestinian movement.
Israel has long imposed such measures during religious holidays, special occasions and elections. While these used to focus more on closing crossings between the occupied West Bank and Israel within its 1967 borders, closures within the occupied West Bank itself have expanded significantly since October 2023.
Linking West Bank settlements
Statistics released by the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission on 25 September reveal the scale of the shutdown. There are now 942 checkpoints, closure points, and physical barriers across the occupied West Bank—comprising 824 permanent checkpoints and closure points, alongside 118 linear obstacles (such as earth mounds, trenches, and road blocks) that span approximately 107.7 km.
Hebron governorate tops the list with 221 permanent checkpoints and roadblocks, followed by Ramallah and al-Bireh with 160, Nablus with 120, Bethlehem with 78 and occupied Jerusalem with 62.
The commission also documented the installation of 13 additional gates and fixed checkpoints in the two months preceding its report, including 10 iron gates in Jenin governorate.
These installations enable the Israeli army to control movement between Palestinian communities, as closing a single gate can block access to a town or village, forcing residents to take alternative routes that considerably lengthen their journeys.
The commission also documented settlers installing iron gates on Palestinian roads, including two near Kafr Ni'ma and Umm Safa in Ramallah and al-Bireh governorate.
Dr. Ibrahim Rabaia, a political science professor at Birzeit University, told The New Arab that Israel has spent decades developing a complex, multilayered system to control Palestinian movement. This extended from closing the crossings linking the West Bank to the territories occupied in 1948, affecting people and goods, to restricting travel between cities and towns within the occupied territories.
Israel tightens these measures during elections, holidays and other occasions, or on security grounds, Rabaia said, adding that the restrictions also served settlement projects which themselves required limiting Palestinian movement.
He described the measures accompanying the current Israeli elections as neither new nor exceptional. However, they coincide with an Israeli military campaign in Hebron and other parts of the West Bank, alongside escalating settler attacks.
Israel has made significant progress in fragmenting the occupied West Bank into separate Palestinian enclaves through complex geographical, security and administrative arrangements, while consolidating the territorial continuity and communication networks between Israeli settlements, Rabaia said.
He argued that Israel was exploiting international, regional and domestic circumstances to advance this project.
The priority given to settler movement has been reflected in statements by Israeli officials. In August 2023, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said his right, and that of his wife and children, to travel on West Bank roads was more important than Palestinians' freedom of movement, citing security concerns.
Following the outbreak of the Gaza war, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for buffer zones around settlements and roads used by settlers, barring Palestinians from entering them even to harvest olives.
The closures also carry mounting economic costs. A March 2025 study by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS), examining the northern and central West Bank, estimated that delays at checkpoints cost Palestinians approximately 191,000 working hours daily.
The resulting losses amounted to around $764,600 a day, or $16.8 million a month, in addition to approximately $6 million annually in extra fuel costs.
These losses coincide with rising unemployment. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics recorded a West Bank unemployment rate of 27.9 percent in the second quarter of 2026, with approximately 284,000 people unemployed amid shrinking employment opportunities, declining economic activity and the repercussions of the war.
From restricted movement to displacement
Some Israeli closures are linked to colonial policies intended to tighten control over Palestinian movement, often justified as measures to prevent attacks on Israelis. However, these security arguments alone do not explain the nature of the restrictions, according to Adel Shadid, a specialist in Israeli affairs.
He told The New Arab that the measures are also part of a policy of collective punishment and revenge pursued by far-right settler forces within the Israeli government, including Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and lawmakers Orit Strock and Avi Maoz.
Shadid pointed to Smotrich's public celebration of the demolition of Palestinian buildings and confiscation of land, as well as Ben-Gvir's statements about punitive measures against Palestinian prisoners.
He argued that the political dimension was paramount, adding that the Israeli government sought to subdue Palestinians into accepting a long-term reality of restrictions and control in line with the ideological project of religious Zionism and Smotrich's "Decisive Plan" for annexing the West Bank, proposed in 2017.
The closures also aim to intensify economic and social pressures, pushing Palestinians to reconsider their political choices and fuelling internal disputes over responsibility for deteriorating living conditions, Shadid added.
Israeli affairs specialist Muawiya Musa, meanwhile, told The New Arab that in his eyes there was no direct link between the closures and the elections. Instead their origins could be traced to a policy that began taking shape during the second intifada in 2000.
Musa distinguished between what he called "Israel 1", representing the traditional Israeli political current, and "Israel 2", represented by the settler right and religious Zionism.
He argued that the former sought to turn closures into de facto borders confining Palestinians to Areas A and B under the Oslo Accords, while the latter openly advocated complete separation and the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank altogether.
The two interpretations share the view that Israeli closures extend beyond immediate security concerns, even if analysts differ over their precise objectives. Geographical fragmentation and economic and social pressure, they argue, operate together to consolidate control over Palestinians and restrict their ability to move, work and maintain stable lives.
The policy takes on added significance amid increasingly explicit Israeli calls for displacement. In February, Smotrich announced plans to "encourage migration" from the West Bank and Gaza, linking this to the cancellation of the Oslo Accords and the imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.
The strangulation of the occupied West Bank, therefore, is not the result of a temporary security situation or an election season. Rather, it reflects an accumulation of restrictions and settlement policies that have accelerated since the war on Gaza, gradually turning the territory into an increasingly unliveable spaces for Palestinians.
By narrowing the geographical space available to Palestinians and undermining the foundations of their economic and social lives, the expanding network of checkpoints, gates and road restrictions is intensifying pressures on residents' ability to remain in their communities, as the displacement of Palestinians becomes an increasingly explicit component of the Israeli right's political agenda.