For pregnant Palestinian women, checkpoints are a matter of life and death

For the past year and a half, Israel has imposed an increasingly suffocating system of checkpoints and roadblocks across the entire West Bank. During the ceasefire in Gaza this January, the entrance to my village of Umm Al-Khair was barricaded, as were the entrances to all West Bank cities and villages as a form of collective punishment. With no nearby grocery stores, a basic task like buying a kilo of salt in Yatta — the closest city to us — went from a…