Summary
Aref Jaber is on a neighbor’s roof, trying to get home. At 51, 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 160, is the only way in or out for the 140 families who live there. But Checkpoint 160 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. At the same time that deadly Israeli settler violence robs communities in the West Bank of their land, and amid the genocide in Gaza, Israel has expanded its infrastructures of military control and domination. Since 2023, Israel’s fragmentation of Palestine, underway for generations, has accelerated. The West Bank has, for the nearly 3.5 million Palestinians who live there, ceased to exist as a contiguous territory. According to the most recent UN data from December 2025, at least 925 fixed and temporary checkpoints, metal gates, roadblocks, and earth mounds divide the West Bank. (A Palestinian governmental commission reported this month that the number is now 942.) This fracturing has torn families apart, stifled the economy, and obstructed access to essential services such as hospitals and schools.