Beginning in March 1993, after the Israeli-imposed closure on the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip was announced, Israel started to install seemingly temporary military checkpoints along the Green Line and between East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank (see Jerusalem: A Closed City).2 With time, these checkpoints proliferated and went on to become part of a complex and massive system (including the permit regime, the various geopolitical terms of the Oslo Accords, the bypass roads, and the Separation Wall) that has fragmented Palestinian space and time and deprived Palestinians of their freedom of movement3 in a large, militarily occupied area where Israeli citizens remain outside said system and retain complete freedom of movement and all their legal and political rights under Israeli civil law (see Closure and the Dismemberment of Jerusalem).

By 2020, according to United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) data,4 as of June 2020, throughout the occupied West Bank, there were 179 fully staffed or occasionally staffed checkpoints, in addition to 154 road gates, 68 roadblocks, and 371 other kinds of movement obstacles set in the face of Palestinians.5 This does not include the 84 agricultural gates in the Separation Wall that restrict Palestinians from accessing their agricultural lands, the absolute majority of which are only seasonally opened and for a brief amount of time during the day6 (see Al-Jidar: An Instrument of Fragmentation).

In addition, thousands of temporary checkpoints are set in place spontaneously by the Israeli army across West Bank roads each year (commonly referred to as “flying checkpoints”). Between April 2019 and March 2020, Israeli forces deployed more than 1,500 flying checkpoints across the West Bank.7 Between January 2017 and August 2018, Israeli forces deployed about 4,924 flying checkpoints across the West Bank.8

Checkpoints in the occupied territories are not exceptional in the Israeli-Palestinian encounter; Israel imposed them on Palestinian communities elsewhere throughout the years since the state’s founding. For example, in September 1948, the few Palestinians remaining in what became West Jerusalem were corralled into a fenced-in zone, called Zone A, in the al-Baq‘a neighborhood of the New City and forced to remain in it without freedom of mobility or access to the rest of the city or their homes for over a year (see The West Side Story).9 Inside the rest of the land that became Israel after 1948, a military rule was imposed on Palestinians who were citizens until 1966; it derived from the emergency regulations that had been in force under the British Mandate. “The main use of these regulations was to reduce these citizens’ freedom of movement. Palestinian Arab population centres were declared military zones: their residents could not exit them without a permit from the local military commander.”

Indeed, checkpoints have become so ubiquitous and central to Palestinian experience that Palestinian intellectual, political writer, and former MK Azmi Bishara wrote a book about them in 2004 in which he referred to the occupied territories as “the land of the checkpoints,” the Israelis as “the owners of the checkpoints,” and the Palestinians as “the people of the land of the checkpoints.”10

This Backgrounder provides a brief introductory overview of the permanent checkpoints around Jerusalem today. Part 2 examines the complexities of navigating the checkpoints for Palestinians.

For more background and historical context on checkpoints, closure, and the permit regime, see Closure and Access to Jerusalem. For in-depth coverage of the Separation Wall, see The Separation Wall.

Among the numerous checkpoints, 39 are defined as “points of entry into Israel” or “final checkpoint before Israel.” In Israeli parlance, this means that they sit on the boundary point where the territory becomes Israel. While under international law this would mean Israel within its 1948 boundaries (i.e., on the 1949 Green Line), in fact, most of these “entry” checkpoints are not placed on the Green Line at all but rather within—and sometimes deep within—the territory of the occupied West Bank.11

Some of the checkpoints currently positioned around Jerusalem date back to the 1990s. However, most of them were installed in the fall of 2000 and the commencement of construction of the Separation Wall in 2002.12

As far as Jerusalem is concerned, there are 18 checkpoints directly surrounding the city:

• 13 are checkpoints controlling entry into Israeli-controlled East Jerusalem.
• 5 are located between Palestinian localities in the West-Bank around Jerusalem.

Note that five additional checkpoints lie just beyond the city to the south. While these are beyond the scope of this Backgrounder, they can be found on Map 1, and they generally control (or prevent) Palestinian access to the “Gush Etzion” bloc of Israeli settlements in the south.

Each of these 18 checkpoints has its particular designations and allowed crossers, as detailed in Table 1.

Of the 13 checkpoints controlling entry into East Jerusalem, some are designated for the passage of people only and must be crossed on foot; others are only for commercial goods (e.g., Beituniya commercial checkpoint north of Jerusalem) and require a switch of vehicle using back-to-back unloading of goods, because cars with Palestinian Authority (West Bank) license plates are not allowed to enter Israel. Some checkpoints are only for those (whether Israelis or Palestinians) holding Israeli identification cards (e.g., Hizma checkpoint northeast of Jerusalem); at certain of these checkpoints, yellow-plated vehicles are allowed to drive through.

Others can be crossed only by Palestinians whose names are registered on a list on file (and continually updated) at the checkpoint (e.g., al-Sawahira al-Sharqiyya checkpoint).

Some, while located far beyond Israeli municipal boundaries, are placed on Israeli-only roads that lead to Jerusalem (e.g., the Ofer-Jerusalem checkpoint). Only one, the al-Walaja checkpoint, is actually located on the Green Line.

The five checkpoints around Jerusalem monitor and control access around the Jerusalem area. Some are placed between Palestinian villages, towns, and neighborhoods, such that one side is found within the vicinity of an Israeli settlement enclave on the West Bank side of the Separation Wall (e.g., Biddu/Beit Iksa checkpoint northeast of Jerusalem); others are found on Palestinian roads that pass through settlement-controlled areas (e.g., the Container/Wadi al-Nar checkpoint southeast of Jerusalem).

The largest checkpoint is Qalandiya, north of Jerusalem, which controls all entry coming into Jerusalem from the north (Ramallah and beyond to the rest of the West Bank). It is one of only three checkpoints that Palestinians with PA ID cards are allowed to use (see Table 1), and the only one on the northern edge of Jerusalem. Today, more than 25,000 Palestinians pass through the Qalandiya checkpoint each day, and the checkpoint handles a third of daily Palestinian movements in and out of the West Bank.13

The other major checkpoint controlling access to Jerusalem is Checkpoint 300 in the south, which separates Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Checkpoint 300 is the second of the three checkpoints that PA ID cardholders are allowed to use. Like Qalandiya, Checkpoint 300 started out in the 1990s “as a combination of cement blocks, sand bags, and Israeli soldiers, with the aim of checking the documents of Palestinians travelling to Jerusalem and further on.”14 Today, about 15,000 Palestinians pass through this checkpoint on foot each day.15

The third checkpoint that PA ID cardholders are allowed to use is al-Zaytun/Ras Abu Sbitan in the east, separating al-‘Izariyya from East Jerusalem.

The namings of these checkpoints varies widely between Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis generally use the Hebrew term ma’var, which means “crossing,” while Palestinians use the Arabic word for checkpoint (hajiz), which indicates separation of one side from another, rather than the term crossing (ma‘bar), which connotes mere routine crossing from one side to the other. Also, hajiz holds the connotation of blocking someone’s regular way.

But the language sanitizing has gone even further—now the “crossings” have been elevated to “border crossings” and “international terminals” in Israeli discourse, as part of a massive effort to rebrand the occupation as a “humanitarian” effort offering a “modernized,” “efficient,” and highly “professional” experience.16

The checkpoints around Jerusalem are mainly run by “Crossing Departments” of the Israeli Police or by the Israeli Border Police.17 The policemen are accompanied by civilian guards employed by private security companies.18

In 2019, Israel unveiled new “terminals” for these checkpoints designed to resemble airports and thus to give an impression of normalcy at an “international border.” But these checkpoints are surveillance tools that are located mostly within the land of the occupied West Bank itself, and not on any kind of international border. They are part of a system of military occupation that deprives an entire, largely stateless population of freedom of movement, not an international system that exists within a framework of international law for citizens of different countries. They are a system imposed by force on a population that is completely under the control of the state, with no right to reject or appeal its suffocation of their lives.

No matter how apparently “upgraded” the checkpoints may appear to be or how sanitized is the language used to explain them to the world, the reality is that the closure and permit regimes that underpin these checkpoints remain in full force, with all the consequent violations of basic humans rights that derive from them (see Closure and Access to Jerusalem).

More notable than the appearance of “normalcy” is the clear entrenched permanence that construction of such a major apparatus of movement control, along with the Separation Wall in which they are embedded, implies. To the state, this system is here to stay. To the Palestinians, this means their right to freedom of movement is denied indefinitely.

Map 1 locates the military checkpoints around Jerusalem. Table 1 details more about how the checkpoints control Palestinian entry into and movement around Jerusalem, and how Palestinians must navigate a labyrinth of complex regulations that govern who can or must use specific checkpoints, how they must come prepared, and when the checkpoint may or may not be open. Checkpoints are listed in clockwise order as they occur in the map.

It is important to underline the fact that this checkpoint system is for Palestinians only. Jews, whether they live in Jerusalem or in settlements around Jerusalem, enter the city by passing through a vehicular checkpoint that offers them an experience similar to passing through a tollbooth (see Closure and the Dismemberment of Jerusalem).