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.