If you want to drive the 15 or so miles from Jerusalem to the city of Jericho, in the Palestinian Territories, Google Maps will tell you: “Can’t find a way there.” Waze will issue a warning: “Caution: This destination is in a high risk area or is prohibited to Israelis by law.” If you press “Confirm Drive” nonetheless, the app will direct you, just not all the way.

When you pass from Israel into the West Bank, part of the occupied Palestinian Territories, Waze’s directions simply end. To keep going, you need to change your setting to allow access to “high risk” areas. Even then, GPS coverage tends to be limited.

If you’re set on crossing the often invisible dividing line between Israel and the Palestinian Territories, your best option is to close Waze and open Maps.Me. The Belarus–born, now Russian–owned navigation app pulls from open source mapping and can be downloaded for offline use, a crucial feature in the Territories, where there’s no 3G for Palestinian providers.

Maps.Me is more than a source of directions. It’s a database of roads, schools, squares, shops, and other landmarks that programmers have plotted through open source mapping (a Wikipedia–like system, where anyone can add their knowledge), places that otherwise would have been left largely off the radar. It’s a solution born of a push from Palestinians and international NGOs over the past decade to increase mapping in the West Bank and Gaza—to put Palestine, literally and figuratively, on the map.

Boundaries

In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It annexed the latter—a move the international community largely rejects. In a break with foreign policy custom, President Donald Trump announced this week that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Since the mid-’90s, the Palestinian Authority, based in Ramallah, has had semiautonomous control over parts of the West Bank, called Area A and B. At the same time, Israeli settlements (illegal under international law) have expanded in the largest section of the West Bank, called Area C, land the Palestinians claim as their own. Gaza, meanwhile, has been ruled by Hamas (considered a terrorist group by the United States and Europe) and under blockade by Israel and Egypt after a civil war in 2007 pushed out the Palestinian Authority.

In a place and conflict where “facts on the ground” are endlessly contested, having access to good navigation maps and apps is not just a matter of getting there. It’s about recording Palestinian life on the land, and giving people on this side of the dotted line the same access to information and movement as people have on the Israeli side.

“There’s a lot of discussion all over the world, and yet we don’t really know what these places look like,” says Mikel Maron, a programmer and geographer who organized a map-a-thon for Gaza in 2008 with Engineers Without Borders and Palestinian engineers. “The most basic infrastructure of daily life deserves to be seen.”

Maps.me started in 2011 in Belarus, and now has around 80 million downloads, says cofounder Alexander Borsuk. The company, which moved to Moscow after a Russian internet company acquired it at the end of 2014, operates on a simple premise. It takes the open source information available through openstreetmap.org—a free crowd-sourced mapping service—and uses its software to operate its own map and navigation tools with the data. After one team member visited internet-starved Cuba, the team decided to make the maps downloadable for offline use. (Google Maps offers a similar feature.)

For the West Bank and Gaza, programmers using Open Street Maps fill in the names of streets and add the locations of shops, restaurants, schools, parks, squares, and mosques. Once the app is downloaded, any user can add their own pins for a previously undocumented bypass or shop they frequent.