On this edition of Your Call's Media Roundtable, award-winning investigative journalist Lynzy Billing discusses her Mother Jones' investigation about maternal health crisis in the West Bank.
Billing writes, long before the war, Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank dealt with severe restrictions on their freedom of movement. Across the nearly 2,200-square-mile territory, a web of roads connects the growing number of Israeli settlements, while Palestinian villages are caught in the middle, left unprotected and unconnected, their only access to one another through a maze of meandering dirt roads that can be closed by Israeli forces at any time and without warning. As of 2023, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had counted more than 600 obstacles to movement in the West Bank, including checkpoints staffed by Israeli forces or private security companies, roadblocks, gates, and other barriers like mounds of earth and trenches.
Since October 7, Israel has dramatically increased the number of new checkpoints and road closures. In the 10 days following the Hamas attack, the Israeli army erected more than 140 new checkpoints and obstacles on West Bank roads, according to a report published by the Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem. Israel has also imposed curfews in parts of the West Bank, which have prevented many women from reaching a hospital in time to give birth, resulting in a considerable increase of childbirth at home.
Guests:
Lynzy Billing, investigative journalist and photographer based between Afghanistan and Iraq
Resources:
Mother Jones: West Bank Midwives Are Facing a Maternal Health Crisis
PBS: Israeli government quietly sends more than $20 million to unauthorized West Bank settler outposts
