“This woman is dying!” a man screamed again and again, as the ambulance carrying 30-year-old Sujoud Fuqaha sat stuck at an Israeli-controlled gate on its way to a hospital in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Fuqaha had suffered cardiac arrest and needed urgent medical care. An ambulance quickly arrived at her home in Sinjil, about 16 kilometers northeast of Ramallah; from there, “It should have taken 10 minutes to get [to the hospital], but the gate was closed,” her husband Majed explained.
For more than half an hour, the ambulance was held up as Fuqaha’s condition deteriorated, according to an audio recording of the July 17 incident shared by the village’s local council. The recording captures those at the scene pleading for the ambulance to be allowed through.
Islam Karakrah, the paramedic who drove the ambulance, told +972 that the crew tried to resuscitate her on the way. “You usually have around 40 minutes after a cardiac arrest,” he said. By the time they reached the hospital, Fuqaha, a mother of two young children, was pronounced dead. (An Israeli army spokesperson denied reports of the delay, stating that “the time it took to open the gate was shorter than claimed and did not exceed normal.”)
Fuqaha’s death illustrates a recurring pattern of obstructed medical care across the West Bank, where Israel has imposed an expanding system of roadblocks since October 2023. More than 930 gates, checkpoints, and other movement restrictions now fragment roads and communities across the Israeli-occupied territory, limiting Palestinians’ access to major cities and essential services.
According to Eid Dweikat, a spokesman for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), ambulances are increasingly being delayed or forced to take lengthy detours to respond to emergencies, “affecting the speed with which the PRCS can respond to people who need medical assistance.” In the first six months of this year alone, the World Health Organization documented 50 cases of delays in medical care to Palestinians in the West Bank.
To compensate, the PRCS has deployed more than 2,000 first responders in rural communities, maintaining an emergency presence near areas that ambulances may struggle to reach. They can provide immediate first aid while ambulance crews navigate blocked or restricted roads. But when patients require advanced treatment or evacuation to a hospital, Dweikat said, those barriers can become critical.
Fuqaha’s husband, Majed, said he still cannot believe his wife is gone. “I don’t know how to describe it. Life is over right now.”
Targeted for being in an ambulance
“Every minute can mean the difference between life and death,” said Bashar Al-Qaryuti, a paramedic from the village of Qaryut, south of Nablus. “We deal with heart attacks, severe bleeding, serious injuries, and emergency childbirths. These are cases that cannot wait.”
Since October 7, 2023, Al-Qaryuti said, traveling across the West Bank has become “very difficult.” A journey that once took 20 minutes can now take an hour as ambulances are forced to take detours — sometimes through checkpoints such as Huwara, located at the southern entrance to Nablus on the road that connects the city to Ramallah and Jerusalem.
“The problem is not only the checkpoints,” he explained. “At a checkpoint, sometimes you can coordinate and arrange for an ambulance to pass. But when these gates are closed without anyone there to coordinate with, they become like a prison. In some ways, they are more difficult than a checkpoint because there is no one to speak to.”
Even when ambulances reach a checkpoint, passage is not guaranteed. Al-Qaryuti said soldiers “do not respect ambulances or allow them to pass easily.” Despite their sirens, soldiers frequently stop the crew, checking their identification and that of patients and accompanying relatives, and inspect the vehicle.
“Some of the medical equipment [inside] requires the vehicle to remain running,” he said. “These procedures take time, and that is time we could be using to save a life.”
Ambulance crews must also contend with attacks by Israeli settlers. On Aug. 7, two PRCS medics were injured when settlers attacked their ambulance as they attempted to evacuate a man wounded by settler violence in Khalayel Al-Louz, south of Bethlehem. (An Israeli army spokesperson claimed to have no knowledge of an attack on the ambulance.)
In 2024, Mohammad Musa, a 50-year-old ambulance driver and colleague of Al-Qaryuti, was killed when his vehicle came under gunfire in As-Sawiya, near Nablus. The PRCS said at the time that settlers had shot him.
Al-Qaryuti described other attacks on his own crew, which he frequently documents on the emergency center’s Facebook page. In one incident, settlers smashed the ambulance and tried to set it on fire. “In another incident [in April] near Za’tara, settlers attacked us and threw a firebomb at us.
“Whenever I head toward Nablus or Ramallah, settlers race alongside us and harass us,” he continued. “They consider us enemies. We feel that we can be targeted simply because we are in an ambulance.”
The danger to medics, Al-Qaryuti said, is inseparable from the danger these obstructions pose to their patients. “For us, the biggest problem is not only the danger faced by ambulance crews. It is what happens to the patient when an ambulance cannot reach them quickly or cannot get them to the hospital.”
“An ambulance should be a safe way to reach a patient. It should not itself become a target or another checkpoint. We need to be able to do our job without being attacked, obstructed, or delayed.”
Checkpoint stillbirth
On July 27, a 28-year-old woman who was six months pregnant and hemorrhaging was being transported by ambulance from Qaryut to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus when Israeli soldiers stopped the vehicle at Awarta checkpoint. According to Al-Qaryuti, soldiers made them switch off the ambulance’s engine and electrical equipment for an extended period, despite being told that they were transporting a patient in a medical emergency.
As the delay continued and the mother’s condition deteriorated, a nurse was forced to deliver the baby inside the ambulance. The baby was pronounced stillborn. The mother was later rushed to the hospital, where she underwent emergency surgery and survived.
“Had it not been for God’s mercy, we could have lost her too at the checkpoint,” Al-Qaryuti said. (In response to +972’s inquiry, an Israeli army spokesperson stated that “the ambulance did not carry out the required coordination before arriving at the crossing, so the military force operating at the point was required to carry out an inspection that lasted a few minutes. The ambulance then continued its journey into the city of Nablus.”)
For patients who need urgent hospital care, Al-Qaryuti continued, road closures can leave ambulance crews with few choices. In some cases, the only option is to transport patients to one side of a gate and try to transfer them to another ambulance waiting on the other side.
The consequences were evident across the Nablus area that same weekend. On July 24, armed Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian homes in the village of Tel. An ensuing scuffle turned deadly: Four Palestinians, an Israeli soldier, and a settler were killed. In the aftermath, the army launched widespread raids and arrests and imposed extensive movement restrictions across the area.
With roads into Nablus closed, several women in labor who needed to reach hospitals in the city were unable to do so. Some instead gave birth in ambulances or local clinics.
In Aqraba, south of Nablus, gynecologist Youssra Dweikat told +972 that she delivered two babies at the small, under-equipped clinic where she works. “Aqraba has been under siege. When the entrances are closed, no one can leave, and sometimes reaching medical facilities becomes impossible,” she said. “There is also the danger posed by settlers.”
Dweikat’s clinic is not equipped to handle more complicated childbirths. “We do not have a blood bank, because we are only a local clinic,” she said. “We are not equipped to deal with childbirth complications that require hospital-level care.”
And with movement as unpredictable as it is, Dweikat said she and other medical workers sometimes travel to examine pregnant women at home rather than risk having them make an unnecessary journey through checkpoints and road closures.
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Since October 2023, these conditions have also changed how pregnant women themselves decide when to seek medical care. “They often wait until they are absolutely certain they are in labor before leaving home,” Dweikat said. “That increases the risks for women in Aqraba and in the surrounding villages.”
In response to +972’s inquiry, a spokesperson for the Israeli army stated: “The IDF is working to enable the movement of medical teams, including the passage without inspection of ambulances that coordinate their movement in advance. Failure to coordinate in advance delays the passage of ambulances.”
