West Bank Lockdown Traps Patients, Denies Freedom of Movement

On Friday evening, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a "large-scale military operation" in the occupied West Bank following a settler attack in the village of Tal earlier that day, Palestinian ambulance driver Yousef Diriya, 50, was stuck for four hours at the Awarta checkpoint while transporting a dialysis patient.

In the following days, much of the West Bank—especially Nablus province, but also Ramallah and towns stretching to Bethlehem province—was locked down, forcing ambulance crews to take long detours and endure extended delays at checkpoints to reach hospitals.

A journey that once took Diriya just 20 kilometers (12 miles) now stretches up to 100 kilometers (60 miles), by his estimate. Despite prior coordination and permits, he spends hours at each checkpoint to get patients to Nablus hospitals—the nearest facilities with adequate care for critical cases from surrounding villages—whose entrances have been completely blocked in recent days.

"Even if you coordinate beforehand, and they know the same woman is with you—it makes no difference," Diriya said wearily. "Whether entering Nablus or leaving the checkpoint, the procedure is always the same: checking, taking photos of IDs, taking photos of the ambulance, and then you just wait."

The wait times at checkpoints, as precious minutes tick by for emergency patients, keep Diriya constantly stressed. "It wears us down a lot," he said. "Our job is to save lives. Every minute matters to us."

Early Monday morning, ambulance driver Bashar al-Qaryuti picked up a six-month-pregnant woman from Qaryut, southeast of Nablus, who was experiencing severe bleeding. But before they could reach Nablus, the ambulance stopped at Awarta, this time for half an hour. According to al-Qaryuti's testimony to Wafa news agency, soldiers forced him to turn off the engine, shutting down medical equipment inside. Passengers were searched, including the pregnant woman who was bleeding and in severe pain. After the delay, the woman's fetus died before reaching the hospital, deeply distressing the mother and al-Qaryuti.

Health system 'collapsing'

Illegal Israeli settlements have choked Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank for decades, but restrictions have intensified since the far-right Israeli government took power in late 2022 and Israel's genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.

Even before Friday evening's de facto lockdown, West Bank towns and villages had seen checkpoints multiply and entrances increasingly blocked entirely—with deadly consequences.

On July 5, at the Deir Ammar refugee camp northwest of Ramallah, three-month-old Ahmed Zaid stopped breathing. His family raced to an Israeli military gate that had been locked, blocking the camp and two nearby villages from the hospital since February. Soldiers refused to open the gate even as Ahmed's father approached, begging them to let him through. By the time the family reached an ambulance via another route, it was too late; the baby was declared dead on the way to the hospital.

On July 18, less than a week before the lockdown, Sujood Fuqahaa, 30, from Sinjil, died of cardiac arrest after soldiers refused to let her ambulance pass while the town was under a week-long siege blocking all entrances. These recent cases follow two years in which medical staff have frequently reported being blocked from reaching victims of attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers.

Adding to this is a severe shortage of medical supplies across the West Bank, along with a health system struggling financially because Israel blocks tax revenues meant for the Palestinian Authority. "The entire health system is collapsing," said Imran Anati, a researcher at Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

The United Nations has recorded some 925 movement barriers imposed by Israel across the territory, affecting around 3.4 million Palestinians. But Diriya and other medical workers interviewed by Al Jazeera describe the wide-scale Nablus lockdown that began Friday evening as the most severe movement restriction in the area since October 2023. "This is another case of collective punishment that the Israeli authorities are applying to Palestinians," Anati said.

The systematic attacks on the West Bank health system remind Anati of tactics used in Gaza. On Friday, Israeli forces entered the Nablus Specialized Hospital, where they handcuffed medical staff while arresting two brothers wounded in a shooting near Tal, according to Wafa. The World Health Organization has recorded 233 attacks on health facilities, personnel, and ambulances across the West Bank in 2025 alone. "The attacks they have done on medical teams in Gaza—you are seeing them doing the same in the West Bank," Anati said.

'Demoralising'

In Aqraba, a village near Nablus, Dr. Ayser Bani Jaber's small clinic is minimally equipped, so serious cases are typically transferred to Nablus hospitals. But this week, things were different. Bani Jaber described two women who arrived in the early hours of Sunday—both in labor but unable to reach Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, the nearest facility equipped to handle complications. "We—the medical team—are truly horrified," he listed the blood, medicines, and equipment needed for safe deliveries.

Fortunately for the two infants, Bani Jaber's wife, gynecologist Yusra Dweikat, who works at Rafidia Hospital, was stuck at home in Aqraba because of checkpoints. She came to the clinic when the first woman arrived at 1 a.m. She determined there was no time to wait and delivered the baby in inadequate conditions. The second woman arrived at 3:30 a.m., crying in fear. All ambulance crews told the doctors that checkpoints made travel to Nablus impossible. Dweikat delivered again at the clinic. After the birth, the mother began bleeding—a complication the clinic couldn't handle because Aqraba has no blood bank; the nearest is in Nablus. It took half an hour of calls, coordination, and negotiation before an ambulance was permitted to transfer her to Rafidia.

"Locking down entire communities while preventing ambulances from reaching patients or evacuating the wounded places civilians' lives in immediate danger," Anati said, calling on Israeli authorities to "immediately ensure safe and unrestricted access for ambulances and medical personnel" as required by international humanitarian law.

After the woman from Qaryut miscarried early on July 27, Diriya said restrictions eased slightly later that day. But late that evening, Diriya relayed urgent news from the road, sirens audible in the background: another woman was in labor and bleeding. With Nablus checkpoints still closed, his team had no choice but to divert her to the hospital in Salfit, over 25 kilometers south of Nablus. "She gave birth on the way, in the ambulance," he announced, "just minutes before we reached the hospital."

With Nablus's rural villages locked down, local medical workers—and doctors—are left with few resources. "Providing adequate medical support in villages is extremely difficult," Bani Jaber said. "All of this directly affects whether patients survive. Whatever we manage is due to our own resourcefulness."

As Diriya and his dialysis patients were blocked at the Awarta checkpoint for hours on Friday, he noticed an Israeli ambulance simply passing through. "Vehicles with Israeli yellow license plates can pass even when the road is closed," he observed. "In our work as medical staff, we serve everyone: Arabs, Jews, Israelis, Palestinians. All I care about is providing humanitarian care to anyone who needs it. So of course it's demoralising: I'm stuck waiting for long periods, while my colleague in another ambulance—because he's not Palestinian, because he's Jewish—passes freely. But I have no freedom at all. That affects you psychologically—it really does."