Creating a ghost town: Lives in limbo behind Israeli gates and checkpoints
Fayha Shalash reports in Al Jazeera on 11 October 2026:
Badr al-Tamimi, 60, lives in Hebron’s Old City, where Israeli checkpoints, iron gates and road closures turn the simplest tasks into a dispiriting daily ordeal for Palestinian residents.
But the situation goes beyond frustrating restrictions on movement. Israel has created a ghost town in parts of Hebron, where residents feel they are being driven away by suffocating Israeli measures. This is most pronounced in an area known as H2, where Israel has complete control and Palestinians are subject to the dictates of the military.
A few days ago, Israeli authorities installed three iron gates across a 200-metre (656-foot) stretch of Hebron’s Old City – amounting to just 0.2 dunams (200 square metres) – as part of Israel’s apparent attempts to restrict Palestinians’ freedom to move around the city.
Hebron Mayor Yousef al-Jabari told Al Jazeera that one gate was erected on al-Zahid Road, the only route accessible to vehicles reaching the Old City entrance. A second was placed at the start of al-Shalala Street, which leads to shops connecting to the Bab al-Zawiya area in the city centre. A third towers over another section of al-Shalala Street, a thoroughfare used by pedestrians to access the shopping area.
They are part of a wider web of travel restrictions across the occupied West Bank, but Hebron, which has a strong settler presence, has suffered more than most Palestinian cities. Approximately 40 percent of the 89 checkpoints in the West Bank and 11 percent of all 925 movement obstacles are located in the H2 area of Hebron, which is under tight Israeli control, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).