The Palestinian Territory has since 1967 been occupied by Israel. Following a large number
of disturbances as protests to the occupation, Israel has imposed mobility restrictions for
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The mobility is regulated by for example
checkpoints, roadblocks and earth mounds. In 2002, Israel started to build a concrete wall
around and inside the Palestinian Territory of the West Bank, opposing international law and
human rights. The restricted mobility is affecting the accessibility for the Palestinian people.
The term accessibility means in this context the ability for people to reach certain
geographical locations that might be of importance, such as health care facilities. This study
aims at assessing, quantifying and documenting the present accessibility status to general
hospitals by using a GIS-based model that includes information on the roads system, hospitals
and Israeli physical obstructions across the West Bank. When talking about accessibility to
health care, the time it takes to reach the facility is in many cases more important than
distance and therefore, accessibility is in this study measured by time. Data on road speeds
was collected from speed measurements and data on delay at checkpoints was collected by
interviews. When all data was collected and synthesized, a network model was built and
analyzed using the Network Analyst tool of ArcGIS. Three types of Network Analyses were
conducted: Service Area, Closest Facility, and Route. It was found that most people live
within a border of 15 minutes to a general hospital but there are 25000 people that have no
accessibility at all in the present situation. 285000 people are affected by at least one
checkpoint on the way to the quickest reachable general hospital, and the delay at checkpoints
can be up to 3 hours long. The result also shows that the Israeli imposed physical
obstructions, including checkpoints and barriers increases the travel time significantly, both at
the regional and intra-regional levels.