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The Man Behind a West Bank Telegram Channel Trying to Keep Palestinian Drivers Safe
The first time we were supposed to meet Anas Hattab, he canceled at the last minute: There was no way to make it from his hometown in Tulkarm, in the northern West Bank, south to Ramallah, where we were meeting, and back before it got dark. That trip, which used to take him an hour, now often takes two to three hours—and some days far longer—because of Israeli military checkpoints on the way. This was one of those days.
This story was produced in partnership with the Palestine Reporting Lab, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), Lighthouse Reports, and Evident.
At 30, Hattab’s life now revolves around these checkpoints—perhaps more than any other Palestinian in the occupied West Bank. But he has also transformed his community’s approach to them: Nearly 350,000 people follow his traffic Telegram group, which has closed a gap left open by major navigation apps that fail Palestinian users. Local radio stations build their hourly road segments off his dispatches. A routing system used by West Bank companies and a new local app pull his data into their own.
It began in 2019. Hattab was working during the day as a digital designer at a newspaper in Ramallah. When one shift ended, he started another, this time as the paper’s delivery driver. That meant that most nights, Hattab had to drive all around the West Bank. After loading the fresh editions into his car, he would drive north, looping through the cities of Nablus and Jenin, eventually reaching his home in Tulkarm by dawn. He found himself dodging Israeli military raids, settlements he had to route around and, most of all, unpredictable checkpoints, which could cause hours-long delays and where armed Israeli soldiers could search him or his car.
For decades, Israel has restricted or barred Palestinian vehicles from many of the main arteries through the West Bank, while Israeli vehicles pass freely. Popular navigation apps like Google Maps don't account for any of it. They do not mark the 942 checkpoints, gates, and other barriers that now fragment the territory, and they default to what their algorithms deem the fastest routes, many of which run through settlements and areas under Israeli control. A Palestinian driver who follows their directions risks being arrested, fined, or shot.
Israeli checkpoints frequently make it difficult to travel even short distances in the West Bank, often blocking traffic for hours at a time.
Navigating these uncertain roads, night after night, wore on Hattab. He knew he wasn't the only one. “People were scared to leave their governorates,” he says. At the core of that fear was an information void. So he began devising a way to fill it, for himself and every other Palestinian in the West Bank.
Seven years ago, Hattab launched a Telegram group called “Road Conditions.” The idea was that people would share information with each other about movements at checkpoints—warn each other about delays or closures, about settler or military presence and violence. Hattab posted the link in local news groups, and waited. They came in a trickle, at first, and then, as checkpoints began to multiply in 2022 and delays got worse, they came in a flood.
As more people joined Road Conditions, the pressure on Hattab mounted. When checkpoints locked down major cities, the number of users could spike, sometimes by thousands at a time. Dozens of commuters would ask about the same checkpoint, and answers would pour in at once. “Clear,” “open,” “closed.” All three could be true within the same hour. "Ten minutes is a long time," Hattab says. "Things change instantly." The questions landed on him, thousands of messages a day. “In the beginning,” he says, “I barely slept.”
When Hattab started Road Conditions, his odometer read 70,000 kilometers. Within four years it read 274,000, inside a territory barely 130 kilometers from tip to tip. It is the equivalent of driving around the Earth more than five times, without ever leaving the West Bank.