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.

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.

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.

What began as a crowdsourced tool for people to help each other navigate the occupied West Bank was becoming an essential utility. To keep Road Conditions reliable, soon after launching the group in 2019, Hattab closed the public chat and asked the most active contributors to become moderators. More than a dozen volunteers now run the feed. Drivers from every corner of the West Bank send them reports, usually with a photo or video. Moderators check these updates by asking others on the ground, cross-checking other local pages, or driving the roads themselves.

As Road Conditions grew, users asked about roads in cities Hattab had never been to. Nothing goes out until he or the moderators have checked it. Before posting a checkpoint is closed, they need to know where it is, whom to ask to verify the update, and what route a driver can take instead. So for six months, Hattab spent his days off driving with no destination. "I'd get in the car, get lost, wherever I ended up, I ended up," he says. He stopped to ask locals for the name of every checkpoint and bypass road until he held the whole map of alternative routes in his head.

After October 7, 2023, a situation that was already dangerous became a crisis. An investigation we published in September, in partnership with the Palestine Reporting Lab, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, and Lighthouse Reports, found that checkpoint delays have increased by more than 50 percent since then. Our analysis found that the average commuter in the West Bank now loses about 77 hours every year taking roundabout routes to avoid checkpoints. Towns that were once quick, 10-minute drives apart have been severed by gates and other obstacles that turn those trips into hour-long voyages. To arrive at our analysis, we went searching for data about checkpoint delays, about when they are open and closed. No official data exists. So our reporting team looked to the Telegram group that Hattab built, scraping the updates that originated from Road Conditions to produce a comprehensive database of the way checkpoints work.

Not long after October 2023, Hattab was driving home at 2 in the morning when a soldier at a checkpoint near the city of Qalqilya stopped him and took his phone. The soldier scrolled through some 20,000 photos Hattab had received on the group of traffic around checkpoints. “You photographed a military site!” the soldier said, then stepped aside to speak with an officer on his radio. The soldier came back and ordered Hattab to delete everything. “I started deleting, in all naivety,” Hattab says. He had erased thousands of photos before the soldier walked back over and told him to go.

“I make sure not to show the military jeeps, not to show one soldier,” Hattab says.

Hattab quit the newspaper and took a job as a sales representative for a construction equipment company because it would put him on a different road every day. “My point is not sales,” he said. “It's Road Conditions.”

Israeli settlers, living in the nearly 150 official settlements and an additional 185 new “outposts” established in the West Bank since 2023—all of which are illegal under international law—have in recent years become a daily threat. In March 2025, at the Yitzhar junction on Route 60, near Nablus, Hattab watched a settler cut off a coffee bean delivery truck directly ahead of him, get out, and beat the driver in the middle of the road. “He was screaming and cursing, armed, beating the driver, grabbing him, punching him, grabbing him again,” he says. Hattab posted the update to the group. That year, the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documented nearly 5,443 settler attacks. In the first eight months of 2026, it recorded about 4,766.

At 4 o’clock one January morning in 2025, news was circulating about Israeli troops on the road out of the city of Tulkarm. By 7, no one knew if they were still there, and no one wanted to be the one to find out.

Hattab was heading from his home in Tulkarm to Ramallah that morning. He started the car. He turned onto the road that people had been asking about and drove slowly, watching the road ahead.

The path was clear. He posted it to the group. “By the grace of God, it was easy this time,” he says.

Hattab knows the roads better, he would wager, than almost anyone now. When a major junction closes, he can predict the closures that follow across a whole corridor, “like dominoes,” he says. “Think of ants. You set their path with a toothpick on the ground.”

With no institutional support and two young children, Hattab sometimes doubts if he can keep going: “You’re supposed to give your family the best life, not give up stable income for a Telegram group.” To him, it's already more than that.

Other innovators have stepped into the fray, launching new apps and groups to help drivers manage traffic. In 2025, for instance, computer engineers Musab Nuirat and Ahmed Gharib launched A Ween Rayeh (Where Are You Heading?). It’s a Palestinian application that aggregates data to produce a real-time heat map of traffic. It was, by Nuirat’s count, the seventh local attempt to build a functional navigation system in the West Bank. And like nearly all the other efforts, A Ween Rayeh relied on Hattab’s data to update its map.

Hattab knows how important what he’s built has become. So he continues. Hattab knows the operation should be 10 times the size. And he knows he should be able to compensate the moderators. But as a volunteer himself, he has no way to pay them. “I can't give them more than a thank you,” he says.

Hattab considers it his duty. “You know how a taxi driver has souls with him in the car, and he has to drive carefully? Same principle.” Mistakes happen, no one can verify every update in real time. “In the end,” he says, “aren't we living in this country at our own risk?”