Two delivery trucks sit idle in a yard in Rujeib, a village southeast of Nablus. They belong to Al-Kamel Dairy Factory, set up in 2022, and Al Jazeera reported on 10 September 2026 that they have been parked for good because demand has fallen and the roads have become unworkable.
The business has felt the squeeze since Israel’s war on Gaza escalated in October 2023. Sales are down 30 to 40 percent, and at least 12 workers have been let go. Milk trucks now wait two to three hours just to get out of Nablus, and up to four at the Awarta checkpoint. Delays like that have spoiled 10 tonnes of the company’s milk.
The owner, Dweikat, told Al Jazeera the city is under “a severe siege” and that it is hard to find a way in without a permanent or semi-permanent checkpoint. Dairy depends on refrigerated trucks, he said, so every hour counts. “Frankly, we were forced to sacrifice many of our customers located outside the city of Nablus.” When a driver is still stuck at midday, the company tells him to turn back. The factory cannot pass its higher costs on to shoppers, he added, because the wider economy is already in recession.
The numbers behind the queues
The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission counts about 925 checkpoints and military gates across the occupied West Bank. Of these, 147 are in the Nablus governorate, Al-Kamel’s main market. Transport movement in the West Bank has dropped by more than 50 percent since the war began.
A March 2025 study by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) tracked 14 military checkpoints and recorded delays of 15 to 50 minutes. Trips leaving the Nablus governorate lost 42 minutes on average, a 77.9 percent increase over the original travel time. MAS estimated that 191,146 working hours vanish each day, which it put at 2.8 million shekels ($764,600) daily, or 62.2 million shekels ($16.8 million) a month. Drivers who detour around closed checkpoints burn an estimated 71,000 shekels ($19,203) in extra fuel every day.
An emptier city
Jobs have shrunk as well. Palestinian workers lost their Israeli work permits during the war, unemployment is high and salaries are falling. Mansour Aliwi, a spice merchant in Nablus, called his city a “ghost town.” Nablus lives off shoppers from nearby villages, he said, and the checkpoints keep them away. “The crisis is deepening month after month,” he told Al Jazeera.
Business journalist Jafar Sadaqa said the past three years of tightening checkpoints have bankrupted companies and cost thousands of jobs. He called the full loss hard to calculate, since it also includes lost chances to develop trade ties.
The separation barrier, built from 2002, still cuts off more than 295sq km (114sq miles) of Palestinian land, according to the commission. If Israel finishes the planned sections, the commission said, 560sq km would be isolated, close to 9 percent of the West Bank.
Sources
- Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank are choking the Palestinian economy | Business and Economy | Al Jazeera
- Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank are choking the Palestinian economy | Al Jazeera
