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Screening will start at 12:00 Noon US EST; 18:00 Euro pe; 19:00 Palestine; 17:00 UK; 05:00 New Zealand; running time, 14 minutes; English/Arabic with subtitles; release date 2025. The screening of the film will be followed by Q&A discussion with film audience.
About the Film
By Balasan Initiative for Human Resources
For 77 years, Palestinian women have carried a double burden of violence, as the oppressive occupation domination intersects with patriarchal control to turn their bodies into contested sites of power, punishment, and resistance. Each day, thousands of Palestinian women cross Israeli military checkpoints on their way to home, work, education, or healthcare, yet this daily necessity becomes an encounter with abuse, humiliation, surveillance, and bodily intrusion. The female body, under occupation, is transformed into a terrain where control over movement mirrors control over land, society, and sovereignty.
The Israeli military checkpoints that spread widely in the occupied West Bank, ostensibly designed for “security control,” function as spaces of embodied domination, where militarized masculinity and patriarchal hierarchy converge to enforce the occupation’s regime of power. These spaces operate through a logic that normalizes violence, suspicion, and degradation, producing the Palestinian woman as both subject and object of domination. The violations documented in this report, ranging from forced strip searches and physical assault to sexual humiliation and verbal abuse, are not isolated acts, but manifestations of a systemic, gendered violence that sustains the prolonged Israeli occupation order through everyday practices of control.
This report is based on ten testimonies (W-01 to W-10) from Palestinian women who experienced harassment, humiliation, or violence at Israeli military checkpoints between October 2023 and August 2025. The gathered testimonies, available in full in Annex I of this report, were taken in accordance with ethical standards that emphasize informed consent, confidentiality, and trauma sensitivity. All personal identifiers were anonymized to ensure participants’ safety and privacy.
Through qualitative analysis of these testimonies, the report identifies recurring patterns of violence, the language and behavior of Israeli soldiers, and the social and psychological effects on the victims. It demonstrates that Israeli checkpoints are not merely instruments of “security” but mechanisms of gendered domination, spaces where the occupation’s power is inscribed directly onto women’s bodies, and where the politics of control over land, identity, and movement intersect.