ISRAELI-OCCUPIED WEST BANK – The oxygen mask slipped from three-month-old Ahmad Zaid’s face. He was in his father’s arms, in front of a closed Israeli military gate  blocking the road between  Deir Ammar refugee camp, northwest of Ramallah, where the family lives, and the city of Ramallah, with a hospital the family was desperate to reach.

His father, Maarouf, told Health Policy Watch that he begged the Israeli soldiers at the gate: “My son is dying. Let him through,” he said. They did not open it. Instead, they fired tear gas and stun grenades.

Hours earlier, the baby had simply drunk more milk than usual. It was 5 July, a hot day in summer,  and his father had gone to Ramallah to collect his birth certificate, to get ready for the baby’s first trip to Jericho the next day. Even a trip inside the West Bank requires the name of a newborn to be registered on their parents’ ID documents while crossing numerous Israeli military checkpoints. 

By the afternoon, his mother Yasmine found him unconscious. She rushed him to a local health clinic, where staff tried to revive him, and called an ambulance to take him to hospital in Ramallah. But the road was closed.

“They screamed at us to turn back. They were furious and threatened to shoot,” Zaid’s mother told Health Policy Watch. “When they saw the boy, they paused for a moment, then became even more violent.”

The family had to turn back and take a long dirt track to reach the ambulance. The baby got to the Arab Consultative Hospital just north of Ramallah at 3:20pm. It was too late. He died on the way to hospital.

Military gates block mobility across the West Bank 

The gate closure was not random.  It was part of heightened Israeli security measures. Paradoxically, Palestinians have increasingly been locked into their communities or even their homes in response to a wave of settler violence that has rocked the West Bank in recent weeks, with attacks on Palestinian homes, vehicles, and agricultural lands – while the perpetrators  have gone largely unpunished by Israeli authorities. 

According to an August report from OCHA, the UN’s humanitarian affairs office, there are now more than 900 physical obstacles blocking aid across the West Bank. 

Amid the violence and restrictions on movement, communities  have also been cut off from vital healthcare services, turning treatable health issues into fatal incidents.

Across the West Bank’s 5660 square kilometers, some 82% has remained under direct Israeli security control since the Oslo Accords divided up the occupied territory into Areas A, B, and C in a 1995 agreement – the last ever to be signed between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. 

And movement across the entire territory has now been paralyzed since late July, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a “wide-scale military operation”. 

This was after armed settlers from a new Israeli hilltop outpost attacked the Palestinian village of Tal, in the northern West Bank near Nablus, killing four Palestinians. Two Israelis died in the clashes that followed, one of them a soldier. In a series of reprisals, the army sealed off Nablus and threw a cordon around a broad swathe of towns in the Nablus district- from Deir Ammar to Aqraba, about 60 kilometers to the northeast.

Health fallout of the Qusra siege 

Homes in the Ras al-Ain area, about 16 km south of Nablus, have meanwhile been under siege since August 9, this after a  mosque in the village was burned down on 26 July. The Israeli army has turned some of the besieged homes into military positions, Palestinian officials say. 

Then in late August, Israeli settlers stormed the home of a Palestinian American  in the nearby village of Qusra, while its owners were inside – generating headlines that went around the world. 

Qusra, which has fewer than 6,000 residents, also saw its water and power supplies damaged. The diplomatic fall out of the siege has gained wide media attention – less so the health consequences. 

Ruqaya Hassan, 28, lives in Qusra with her husband and two daughters. On 21 August, her younger daughter Hour, not yet two and a half, came down with a cold, a high fever and vomiting. “The family’s medicine was running low. The nearest doctor was not far, but the roads were sealed,” she told Health Policy Watch.

An ambulance’s first attempt to reach the house failed. It got through the next day, and Ruqaya left with her sick daughter:  “I thought I would be back soon. I was not,” she said. Two days later, she tried to return home and found she could not: “The Israeli army had entered the area and turned my house into a military position.”

She now stays temporarily with her two daughters at her brother-in-law’s house nearby, unable to close the few dozen metres that separate her from the relatives still trapped inside the besieged area. Her husband, Yousef, remained inside.

As the recent OCHA report notes,  three families have remained been trapped in Qusra since 9 August, after a new settler outpost was built next to their homes. It was only after repeated attempts that aid workers managed to bring the families some food, water, baby formula and medicine – but supplies of all items remain precarious and subject to military approval. On 4 September, about 100 activists who arrived with supplies were first blocked by the army, which declared Qusra a closed military zone, then let through, only to be detained on their way out for violating it.

Too late at health clinic for newborn  

On 27 July, the same day Nablus was sealed off, 34-year-old Rana Rasheed, six months pregnant, suddenly went into premature labor. An ambulance was called to take her to Rafidia Surgical Hospital in the city nearby.

“I was in severe pain, like labour pains, and felt extremely exhausted,” Rasheed told Health Policy Watch. 

What should have been a short trip of nearly 25 minutes became 90 minutes of driving between checkpoints and dirt tracks, as the driver found gate after gate closed before reaching the Awarta checkpoint.

By then, Rana’s condition had turned critical. She began to lose the baby, and bled heavily. “She was in a very critical condition,” Sabreen Attallah, the nurse and midwife travelling with her, told Health Policy Watch. “I’ve worked since 2014, and I had never seen bleeding like that before.”

At the checkpoint, soldiers ordered the driver to turn off the siren and open the ambulance doors, then raised their rifles at Attallah as she tried to explain in English that the patient could die. 

“They screamed at me: ‘shut up!’” she said. She had no choice but to deliver the baby moments before reaching the checkpoint. 

The baby did not survive. 

“I felt profound grief when they told me I had lost my baby,” Rasheed said. “I had been choosing names, getting ready to buy his clothes.”

Access hurdles in the West Bank often delay ambulances from reaching the sick and injured in time. In these moments, minutes mean the difference between life and death.

To bridge this gap, @WHO, in collaboration with the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS), with support… pic.twitter.com/aBRlTXtmca

— WHO in occupied Palestinian territory (@WHOoPt) July 21, 2026

Stillborn baby in Aqraba 

A similar horror story played out on 27 July in Aqraba, a town south of Nablus.

When Ibtisam Bani Jame, 28, went into labor, the road closures meant no ambulance could reach her either. 

“I felt like I had lost hope. I kept thinking I might lose my baby because of a closed road, not my medical condition,” she told Health Policy Watch.

After more than four hours in labour, the family went to the only place they could reach: a small clinic called Dar al-Hikma, never built for deliveries. It had no medicine to stop bleeding, no fetal heart monitor, no incubator, no spare blood.

The baby was stillborn. 

Who decides who gets treated? 

Qaryut, Deir Ammar, Aqraba and Qusra look like separate dots on a map, but their fate is  linked. 

A soldier’s split-second decision to open a gate or leave it shut to families seeking emergency treatment in a nearby hospital in one of the larger West Bank cities in “Area A” under Palestinian Authority control, like Nablus, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Hebron, or Jenin, can be random, arbitrary and lead to life-and-death consequences. 

Meanwhile, patients seeking more specialized treatment in the most sophisticated Palestinian hospitals of East Jerusalem, as well as in Israel, face a range of bureaucratic hurdles.  

They must obtain an official permit from Israel’s Civil Administration – something that cannot usually be had quickly. .

Amos Zwarts is the Israeli official in charge of health coordination for the West Bank.  His  office handles requests to move Palestinian patients into Palestinian East Jerusalem and Israeli hospitals for treatment, working with the Palestinian Health Ministry and its hospitals and health clinics. 

Approval of a patient’s passage is, “the result of coordination among several bodies,” Zwarts told Health Policy Watch.

“The decision is not subject to a unilateral decision by our office alone,” Zwarts added.  “Requests can come through an app, the Palestinian civil affairs ministry, or liaison officers, before being processed by a system that weighs both civilian and security concerns.”

Approval rates for entry into East Jerusalem or Israeli hospitals fell sharply right after the  war in Gaza began in October 2023, from 82% in 2022 to 56% in 2024, and while they have since recovered somewhat, they have yet to reach their pre-war rates.

According to WHO data, while about 51,444 permit requests were made in the first half of 2026,  more than 22% were not approved in time for appropriate treatment. 

No single body takes responsibility for the thousands of rejected or delayed requests -or their human health impacts. 

Empty medicine shelves, doctors on strike 

Behind the siege tactics and the surge in settler lies a deeper, structural crisis in West Bank healthcare, one that predates this summer and will outlast it – a health budget starved since May 2025 by the loss of Palestinian tax revenues.

The revenues have been withheld by Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich  as part of what the liberal Israeli daily Ha’aretz described in one recent editorial as a “Slow Motion Execution of the West Bank Health System,”

To date, the unpaid bill amounts to some $5.7 billion and counting, according to the PA’s own finance ministry.

The budget crisis means that even patients who are lucky enough to reach a hospital in one of the West Bank’s major cities may find there are no medicines to treat them.

In June 2026, the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry said 180 of 520 essential medicines were out of stock on the West Bank. So were 50 of 97 cancer drugs along with medical supplies and laboratory materials.

West Bank medicine shortages threaten thousands of cancer and dialysis patients 

The ministry said the shortage threatened more than 4,000 cancer patients and thousands more on dialysis, and had delayed more than 11,000 operations since the start of the year.

The same budget crisis has emptied West Bank hospitals of staff, as well. 

Physicians hadn’t been paid in full since October 2023, when Hamas launched its surprise incursion into Israeli communities on its periphery, killing about 1200 people and taking 251 hostages -triggering a massive Israeli military onslaught that killed over 70,000 Gazans. 

The ensuing two years of war displaced most of Gaza’s population, damaged or destroyed most of the enclave’s hospitals and health clinics and  left tens of thousands of people with permanent injuries and amputations.  

The simultaneous halt to funds flowing to the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority’s health system has been far less visible on the television screens of the world or in the reports of humanitarian organizations  – but almost as insidious. 

In May, the Palestinian Doctors Association launched a partial strike across all PA-run hospitals and clinics over unpaid salaries. By early May, hundreds of clinics had shuttered, and nurses’ unions cut service hours over the same crisis.

Palestinian Health Minister Dr Majed Abu Ramadan told Health Policy Watch the financial crisis is hurting the ministry’s ability to do its job, at a time when demand for care keeps rising, both inside government hospitals and through referrals to private and foreign hospitals.

“Patients rely on referrals when treatment isn’t available in government hospitals. That makes steady funding key to getting them care on time,” he said.

Unpaid bills can make hospitals and clinics reluctant to accept referred patients, or slow down approvals, Abu Ramadan said.

“A delay in a referral isn’t just paperwork. For some patients, it means treatment they can’t get anywhere else arrives too late,” he said.

Health workers detained 

Arrests of medical staff have also depleted the ranks of some of the most public-minded professionals.

At dawn on 22 June, Israeli forces, backed by border police, arrested Dr Mazen al-Rantisi, 71, from his home in Ramallah. His family was not told why. Known for decades as the “doctor of the poor,” al-Rantisi chairs a committee overseeing clinics in remote villages. In August, his lawyer later told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that he had been denied his medication in Ofer prison, and that staff refused to let him see a doctor. The Israel Prison Service said the claims were untrue.

Dr Khaled Ayyash, 63, was detained on 24 June and later released. Jamila Yacoub Abu Dahou, a Palestinian-Australian public health expert, 66, was arrested in July, accused of funnelling money to the Union of Health Work Committees, a health workers’ group that Israel banned in 2020. She was released after 23 days.

The most recent case is Dr Dima Mohammad Amin Barakat, 54, an obstetrician-gynaecologist arrested on 18 August. No reason was given. She later suffered a medical emergency in detention including a heart procedure, but a military court still  extended her detention. 

Medical Aid for Palestinians said her detention came amid “a wider and growing pattern of attacks, detention and intimidation targeting Palestinian healthcare workers.”

A Palestinian rights network said the arrests fit a pattern of targeting doctors and health institutions, though it stopped short of saying every case shares the same motive. 

WHO has so far recorded 25 arrests or detentions of health workers or patients in the West Bank so far this year, through the end of July. That figure is part of a broader tally of 98 attacks on health care documented across the West Bank over the first seven months of this year, which left 3 people dead and 87 injured. Some 83 health transport vehicles and 11 health facilities were also damaged in the process – with attacks alone nearly quintupling in July, from 8 in June to 37.  

Aseel Mafarjeh is a West Bank-based journalist covering the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including settler violence, Israeli military operations and raids on refugee camps, Palestinian Authority governance and financial crises, and the impact of movement restrictions on daily life. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera English, TRT World, +972 Magazine, The New Arab, and Mondoweiss.  This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

Image Credits: Aseel Mafarjeh/HPW, Health Policy Watch , WHO oPT, ESRI, OCHA, UNGIS & for Areas A, B, C, OCHA and Wikipedia Commons, WFP/Claire Nevill, BTSelem.