Forget a map, this is how Palestinians are navigating unpredictable West Bank roads
Screenshots from a Telegram group tracking traffic and checkpoints, overlaid on a photo of Palestinians crossing a road block imposed by the Israeli army at the entrance to the village of Sinjil, July 2026
Nagham Zbeedat reports in Haaretz on 26 August 2026:
The Einav checkpoint was supposed to remain open around the clock. At least, that was what the Israeli army had announced last Thursday, according to Mohammed Omar. But on his way back from Tulkarm the following day, the 30-year-old taxi driver found it closed, with cars no longer allowed through. Omar waited for around 40 minutes, hoping the gate might reopen.
He then sent a message to Radio Basma, a Palestinian station based in Rawabi in the central West Bank: Einav is closed. His report joined a constant stream of voice notes, messages and warnings sent by drivers across the West Bank, checked by the station and redistributed through its broadcasts, WhatsApp groups and Telegram channel.
The updates tell him which iron gates – installed by the Israeli army and, in some cases, settlers, at the entrances to Palestinian towns after October 7 – are locked, where a temporary checkpoint has appeared, whether cars are moving through a permanent checkpoint, and where settlers have been reported on the road. If the route appears dangerous, he may cancel the journey. Otherwise, he searches for a detour, even when it adds an hour to a trip that should take only minutes.
The update Omar sent from the checkpoint is part of a Palestinian-built navigation system that now stretches across the West Bank. The same information is used by workers trying to reach their jobs, students traveling to universities, families moving between towns and ambulance crews responding to emergencies.
Haaretz joined Omar, who has worked as a taxi driver for seven years, for a 21 km drive between Ramallah and Beit Duqqu, northwest of Jerusalem, last Friday. Before even leaving his home in Birzeit, near Ramallah, or accepting a passenger in another town, he checks around 10 road report groups. “It has become almost impossible to go anywhere without knowing the situation on the road,” Omar says. “You don’t calculate the road in kilometers. You calculate it according to the condition of the road.” Services like Radio Basma make that a little easier.
Everyday life, interrupted
Radio Basma staff at work in the control room, August 2026. The station’s road bulletins have grown into a West Bank-wide navigation network.
When Radio Basma began broadcasting just a few days before October 7, 2023, its programming was designed primarily for younger listeners, with music and discussions about art and everyday life, and – as at any radio station – routine traffic updates. “We wanted the normal life that all of us want to live,” says Fatmeh Barqawi, a news director at the station who has worked in Palestinian media for nearly 20 years.
Its road segment, “Azma al-Tariq” – “Traffic on the Road” – initially resembled an ordinary traffic segment, broadcasting rush-hour updates. That version lasted only a few days. After October 7, the station abandoned the programming schedule it had spent months preparing. Within 24 hours, staff began reshaping the road bulletin as military gates, checkpoints and closures spread across the West Bank. By the end of 2025, the West Bank had some 925 movement obstacles – gates, checkpoints, roadblocks and more – according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, up 43 percent from the 20-year annual average.
“Every time something happens, the collective punishment falls on the West Bank,” Barqawi says. The staff realized that they could offer listeners information about the roads.
The station began building a network of contacts in Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilyah, Salfit and other areas in the north, center and south. Taxi and public-transport drivers became its principal sources because they were continuously moving between towns and villages.
Program director Diaa Hroub created the first WhatsApp group by adding friends, colleagues and employees who traveled to Radio Basma’s offices in Rawabi. Within one night, he says, the group had around 1,000 participants.
Radio Basma now operates 11 WhatsApp groups into which staff send updates, each with around 1,025 participants, while its Telegram channel has approximately 14,800 followers, according to Barqawi. The station’s broadcasting hours used to be from 7 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. In the middle of last year, it extended its hours by an hour in the morning and night, at the request of its listeners, since people were still on the roads with closures occurring late into the night. Other stations in the West Bank have since started operating a similar updates service.
Israa Orabi, who has worked in radio since 2012 and joined Basma when it was founded, monitors other public WhatsApp and Telegram groups used by drivers traveling throughout the West Bank. The drivers often speak to one another as they would in a family group, exchanging detours and warnings in short messages recorded whenever traffic allows them to reach for their phones. “They might not think there’s an entire staff listening to them,” Orabi says. “But they trust that we hear every voice note, transcribe it and turn it into information that is useful to people.”
Excerpt of road updates from Telegram
User 1: Al-Eizariya heavy traffic, no police presence
User 2: Ein Shibli clear in both directions and traffic is moving fast
User 3: Rawabi entrance at the roundabout is clear in both directions with no army presence
User 4: Jaba checkpoint, fresh checkpoint (military setup)
User 5: Police jeep in Umm Safa heading down toward Halamish
User 6: Kafr Aqab incoming is bad, outgoing is blocked. Things are a complete mess
A single message is rarely enough. Someone reporting that a gate is open may have crossed it 10 minutes earlier; another person may be repeating information from the previous day while still at home. The station seeks confirmation from people currently at the location and, when possible, requests a photograph or video before publishing the report.
“We have to be 100 percent sure,” Orabi says. Even verified information has a short lifespan. Orabi says the situation can change while she is reading the bulletin on air. Soldiers may inspect every vehicle and identification card, then suddenly allow the line to pass. Between the bulletin at 10 minutes past the hour and the one at half past, she estimates that the condition of over half of the roads mentioned may change.
Urgent updates therefore do not wait for the next broadcast. “Atara gate is currently passable” or “Jaba checkpoint is closed” may be sent immediately through WhatsApp and Telegram. Each written and broadcast bulletin ends with a warning: Road conditions may change at any minute.
“There is a great responsibility in telling someone that a checkpoint is open and having them find it closed,” Hroub says. “There is a great responsibility in telling them a road is passable and having them find settlers there.”
Years of listening to drivers have also taught Radio Basma’s staff a vocabulary developed on the road.
Drivers may describe a clear road as “bahri” – literally, “like the sea” – or call a completely immobilized route “clinically dead.” When the information reaches the station, presenters translate the shorthand into language understood beyond the drivers’ groups: The road is “passable,” traffic is “moving” or congestion is “severe.” On WhatsApp, Telegram and the radio, each phrase carries an instruction: continue, wait, turn back, search for another route, cancel the journey.
“At first, we kept asking the drivers what the words meant,” Orabi says. “Then we started understanding one another.” The vocabulary has since traveled beyond the road bulletins and messaging groups. Palestinian rapper Shabjdeed sampled one of Radio Basma’s updates in his song “Youmi,” folding the sound of the broadcast into a track about everyday life. The song’s video – depicting a car ride through Ramallah – has drawn more than 1.3 million views on YouTube.
Radio Basma staff have also heard their bulletins used in advertisements for local businesses, another sign of how deeply the updates have entered everyday life.
‘Going toward the unknown is frightening‘
Orabi, who monitors the groups, hears the frustration directly through the drivers’ voice notes. “Sometimes we don’t know how to make it easier for them,” she says. “They cannot go forward and they cannot go back. All we can say is: May God make it easier for you, and hopefully the road will open.”
A journey that once took 15 minutes may take three or four hours. Some drivers switch off their engines and sleep in their cars while waiting for a checkpoint to open. They return repeatedly to ask whether anything has changed.
The station’s staff try to absorb the anger, giving the same answers over and over while continuing to search for new information. They understand the drivers’ frustration because they are subject to the same roads.
Hroub, the station’s program director, regularly travels between Ramallah and his family’s home in Dura, south of Hebron – a drive that should take about an hour but, with checkpoints and roadblocks, can stretch to two hours or more. Approaching a checkpoint produces a physical reaction.
“My stomach starts to hurt,” he says. “These policies are meant to make you a tense person, an anxious person, alert all the time – to give you a problem with your body and its reactions while you are in your own place, your own country and your own land.”
For Hroub, the purpose of the updates is to make the next road less unknowable. “Going toward the unknown is frightening,” he says. “We try to reduce that fear and anxiety, so the person knows what is ahead and can control their movement.” Hroub sometimes asks his mother in Dura to monitor the updates while he drives. If a gate opens or closes, she calls him. “My mother works as my road correspondent,” he says.
“I want to listen to good music, be relaxed and drive,” he says. “I don’t want Israa to come on and tell me: checkpoint, settlers and misery.” Yet he cannot begin a journey without first checking the station’s road updates. The service that interrupts the music has become the condition that allows him to keep driving.
Asked what “Azma al-Tariq” would become if the military checkpoints, settler attacks and locked gates disappeared, Orabi returns to the program Radio Basma had planned before October 7.
“We would talk about school traffic, work traffic and the markets,” she says. “We would go back to talking about an ordinary traffic jam. Then we would have solved the problem.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety