After October 2023, delay times at checkpoints across Nablus spiked to levels beyond anywhere else in the West Bank. Commuters in Nablus spent an average of nearly an hour and 50 minutes avoiding checkpoints. Ali Haj Ali has worked at Sama Pharmaceuticals, a medicine factory east of Nablus city, for over a decade; now, at 37, he supervises the maintenance of the company’s production lines. When he leaves at the end of his shift at 4:30 pm, he has stopped expecting to reach his home before 8:00 pm, even though it’s only 16 kilometers away.
Some nights, he doesn’t get home at all. He sleeps at the factory, in an arrangement Sama built during Covid-19: Two offices hold a bed and a dozen mattresses for whoever can’t make the trip home.
“My three kids, my wife, my mother, my father, I’d barely see them,” he said. “And forget about seeing friends.” But this is the best job he thinks he can find, so he keeps going.
On a recent afternoon, Ali sat in a room at Sama Pharmaceuticals, along with his colleague, Ohood Khatatbeh. In minutes, they were filling in the details for one another, recounting what they call “Nablus’ checkpoint crisis” in 2024 and 2025. Ali would sometimes reach the checkpoint, sit there for hours, then just turn around and go home.
“Nothing is guaranteed, that’s just how it is here. It’s like a lottery,” Ali said.
Ohood, the factory’s quality assurance manager, is 38 years old, and the mother of three sons. Her town, Beit Furik, is southeast of Nablus. It has a single gate, in or out. Her whole day is dictated by that gate.
The town has had to come up with its own protocol, as Ohood calls it: For every three private cars, one shared taxi gets through. What they cannot control is the pace, interrupted by the soldiers’ change of shifts.
Best case, if the Beit Furik gate is open and traffic is moving freely, the drive home can take 15 minutes. But for a year and a half, it routinely took her more than 5 hours daily. On the worst day, it took 10 hours. In 2024, Ohood’s teenage son had finished a final exam in biology at his school in Nablus just before she was finishing her shift. They found each other at the Beit Furik gate at 4:30 pm, in a line that packed the road several cars wide, all heading for the single entrance to a town of almost 16,000.
Ohood and her son waited in line together until 3 am the following morning.
“The regular employee, the one not separated from work by a checkpoint,” she said, “would be home, eaten, showered, asleep, and already dreaming, while I’m still at the checkpoint.”
Across the West Bank, checkpoints have begun to reshape how businesses like Sama operate. The company has started rejecting highly qualified candidates after assessing the checkpoints they would have to cross to get to work, Ohood said. It’s even started writing it into the job postings, as a requirement: Candidates must live in Nablus. About half of people polled said checkpoints have impacted their or their spouse’s ability to get a job.
In late 2025, Ohood’s one-week-old baby, Aws, came down with jaundice. She and her husband drove him out of town to the hospital. But on the way back, as she remembers it, they they found the soldier already closing the gate.
“Go back,” the soldier yelled in Arabic from the other side of the gate in Beit Furik.
“Go back where?” her husband asked. “We have a sick child with us.”
The soldier raised his rifle and pointed it toward them. “For God’s sake,” Ohood told her husband, “let’s just go back.” He tried once more anyway, offering to turn around himself if the soldier would just let Ohood and the baby cross the gate on foot. The soldier lost his temper. “I’ll shoot you,” he said.
They turned around, the baby crying in their arms, and waited in line for an hour and a half until the soldier opened the gate again.
