On the radio and online, Palestinians keep up with Israel's West Bank roadblocks

New Straits Times

08-07-2025

RADIO presenter Hiba Eriqat broadcasts an unusual kind of traffic reports to her Palestinian listeners grappling with ever-increasing Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks across the occupied West Bank.
"Deir Sharaf: traffic, Qalandia: open, Container: closed," Eriqat reads out from drivers' live reports, enumerating checkpoints to let listeners know which of the West Bank's hundreds of checkpoints and gates are open, busy with traffic, or closed by the Israeli military.
"My mission is to help Palestinian citizens get home safely," she told AFP in the radio studio in the city of Rawabi between her thrice-hourly broadcasts.
"Covering traffic in the West Bank is completely different from covering traffic anywhere else in the world."
The West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, has long been dotted with checkpoints, but obstacles to Palestinians' movement in the territory have proliferated since the 2023 start of the war in Gaza – a separate territory.
In the West Bank, a territory roughly the size of the US state of Delaware, there are hundreds of new checkpoints and gates, but Israeli authorities do not provide updates about their status.
"The army might suddenly close a checkpoint, and the traffic jam would last an hour. Or they might just show up and then withdraw seconds later, and the checkpoint is cleared", Eriqat said.
The UN humanitarian agency OCHA said in early 2025 there were 849 obstacles restricting the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank, including checkpoints, road gates, earth walls, trenches and roadblocks.
To navigate, Palestinians often rely on minute-by-minute updates from drivers on WhatsApp and Telegram groups, some of which were created by Basma Radio to feed Eriqat's broadcasts.
"We turned to taxi drivers, truck drivers, private companies and even ordinary people," said Eriqat, to create the West Bank's only traffic report of its kind.
The updates were launched in October 2023 – the same month the Gaza war broke out – and are now broadcast by other Palestinian radio stations too.
A Telegram group run by Basma Radio now has some 16,000 members.
Fatima Barqawi, who runs news programmes at the station, said the team had created "contact networks with people on the roads", also receiving regular updates from Palestinians who live near checkpoints and can see the traffic from their window.
Beyond the restrictions imposed by the Israeli authorities, the traffic reports sometimes feature warnings about roads blocked by Israeli settlers, whose attacks against Palestinians have also risen throughout the war.
It is a constantly shifting roadscape, Eriqat said, complicating even what otherwise should have been a quick drive to work, home or to see family and friends.
"You might tell people the checkpoint is open now, but three minutes later, it's jammed again. And it's not a regular jam – it could last six or seven hours," she said.
Maen, a 28-year-old video editor, used to tune in to Basma Radio to plan his weekly commute from Ramallah to his hometown of Bethlehem, but now prefers checking what other drivers have to say.
"I often call a friend who has Telegram while I'm on the road" and ask for updates from checkpoints, said Mazen, who asked to use his first name only for security reasons.
He has deleted Telegram from his own phone after hearing about Palestinians getting into trouble with soldiers at checkpoints over the use of the messaging app.
But in a sign of its popularity, one group in which drivers share their updates has 320,000 members – more than one-tenth of the West Bank's population.
Rami, an NGO worker living in Ramallah who also declined to give his full name, said he listened to the radio traffic reports but mainly relied on Telegram groups.
Yet a safe journey is far from guaranteed.
Rami told AFP he recently had to stop on the way to his hometown of Nablus.
"I pulled over, checked the news and saw that 100 settlers had gathered at a settlement's road junction and started throwing stones at Palestinian cars", recognisable by their green license plates, he said.
And passing through a military checkpoint often "depends on the soldier's mood", said Eriqat.
"That's the difficult part."