Israel Closes West Bank Crossings for a Week as UN Records More Than 300 Checkpoints Territory-Wide

Israeli forces blocked road entrances into Turmus Aya, Aboud, Nabi Saleh, Atara and Taybeh on Sunday, part of a territory-wide closure of the occupied West Bank ordered by Defence Minister Israel Katz for the duration of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. In Yabroud, Ein Siniya and Jaba, soldiers set up checkpoints to search vehicles and check IDs, according to Al Jazeera reporting.

Katz issued the order on the military's recommendation. It runs until Saturday and shuts crossings across the territory, on top of a checkpoint system that already governs daily movement for millions of Palestinians.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) counts more than 300 Israeli checkpoints across the West Bank. As of December, those checkpoints were among 925 separate obstacles, including earth mounds, gates and roadblocks, restricting the movement of 3.4 million Palestinians across the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in September 2024 calling on Israel to end its "unlawful" occupation within a year.

Israel has not complied. Al Jazeera reports the military has instead intensified raids on Palestinian towns, deployed soldiers alongside settlers during attacks, and expanded settlement construction, which remains illegal under international law.

Holy sites, jobs, unemployment

The tightened controls during the closure will cut off or restrict access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem and the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, according to Al Jazeera. The closure also bars entry to Palestinians who still hold Israeli work permits, a workforce already gutted since October 2023.

The Palestinian Institute for Economic Policy Research puts the pre-war figure at roughly 160,000 West Bank Palestinians working for Israeli employers, most inside Israel itself and the rest in settlements. By mid-2024, after Israel barred most permit holders from entering, that number had fallen to about 27,300. Only workers designated essential are now allowed into Israeli industrial zones inside the West Bank.

The Israeli rights group Gisha recorded West Bank unemployment rising from 12.9 percent in September 2023 to 30.7 percent a year later.

For residents, the checkpoint network is not an occasional inconvenience layered on top of ordinary movement. It is the baseline. Routes to work, school and hospitals routinely run through fixed or flying checkpoints, and closures like this week's Sukkot order tighten a system that, per OCHA's count, already governs nearly every road a Palestinian in the West Bank might need to take.