Oct 4, 2026 · 40 min · 18 segments
**Listen to more of The Big Story here:** http://swap.fm/l/wi-bigstorypod-feeddrop Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family. Lost Lives. How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian…
Aref Jaber is on a neighbor's roof trying to get home.
At fifty-one, he is clambering over a wall into the next backyard, up onto the next roof, along the line of stone houses that stand between him and his own front door.
He has no choice.
Alleys and side streets in his neighborhood have been sealed with cement blocks and barbed wire, and a single point of access, called Checkpoint One Sixty, is the only way in or out for the one hundred and forty families who live there.
But Checkpoint One Sixty is closed again.
Jaber is not sure why.
The whim of a soldier, a crash in the scanning system, breaking news in the region, it could be anything.
"For the last three years," he says, "this has happened at least two days a week." So the community has devised a system of alternative routes.
Jaber calls his neighbors to ask if he can come through.
They check their windows for soldiers, and then Jaber scales ladders and traverses roofs.
"When I finally get home," he says, "it feels like I've achieved something monumental." The enclosure of Jaber's neighborhood is a dense microcosm of what life is becoming across the occupied West Bank.
For Palestinians, that is.
Since twenty twenty-three, Israel's fragmentation of Palestine, underway for generations, has accelerated.
The West Bank has, for the nearly three point five million Palestinians who live there, ceased to exist as a contiguous territory.
A Palestinian governmental commission reported this month that the number is now nine hundred and forty-two.
This fracturing has torn families apart, stifled the economy, and obstructed access to essential services such as hospitals and schools.
Israel has never publicly listed the checkpoints it operates, their staffing hours, or their closure times.
It is blind to the checkpoints and tries to route drivers onto roads reserved for Israeli-plated cars.
Instead, citizens have developed their own ad hoc networks to inform each other of closures.
As far as we know, no organization has used that network, combined with new data sets and on-the-ground reporting, to measure what this does to daily life.
Over eighteen months, Wired, Lighthouse Reports, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, Areej, and the Palestinian Reporting Lab investigated the system that has carved the West Bank into cantons and measured what it cost people to move through it.
We analyzed tens of thousands of Telegram messages Palestinians sent to navigate daily checkpoint delays and closures.
Aref Jaber is on a neighbor's roof trying to get home.
At fifty-one, he is clambering over a wall into the next backyard, up onto the next roof, along the line of stone houses that stand between him and his own front door.
He has no choice.
Alleys and side streets in his neighborhood have been sealed with cement blocks and barbed wire, and a single point of access, called Checkpoint One Sixty, is the only way in or out for the one hundred and forty families who live there.
But Checkpoint One Sixty is closed again.
Jaber is not sure why.
The whim of a soldier, a crash in the scanning system, breaking news in the region, it could be anything.
"For the last three years," he says, "this has happened at least two days a week." So the community has devised a system of alternative routes.
Jaber calls his neighbors to ask if he can come through.
They check their windows for soldiers, and then Jaber scales ladders and traverses roofs.
"When I finally get home," he says, "it feels like I've achieved something monumental." The enclosure of Jaber's neighborhood is a dense microcosm of what life is becoming across the occupied West Bank.
For Palestinians, that is.
Since twenty twenty-three, Israel's fragmentation of Palestine, underway for generations, has accelerated.
The West Bank has, for the nearly three point five million Palestinians who live there, ceased to exist as a contiguous territory.
A Palestinian governmental commission reported this month that the number is now nine hundred and forty-two.
This fracturing has torn families apart, stifled the economy, and obstructed access to essential services such as hospitals and schools.
Israel has never publicly listed the checkpoints it operates, their staffing hours, or their closure times.
It is blind to the checkpoints and tries to route drivers onto roads reserved for Israeli-plated cars.
Instead, citizens have developed their own ad hoc networks to inform each other of closures.
As far as we know, no organization has used that network, combined with new data sets and on-the-ground reporting, to measure what this does to daily life.
Over eighteen months, Wired, Lighthouse Reports, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, Areej, and the Palestinian Reporting Lab investigated the system that has carved the West Bank into cantons and measured what it cost people to move through it.
We analyzed tens of thousands of Telegram messages Palestinians sent to navigate daily checkpoint delays and closures.
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