[News] How Israel is using the war with Iran to accelerate its annexation of the West Bank

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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How Israel is using the war with Iran to accelerate its annexation of the
West Bank
Qassam Muaddi
June 18, 2025
------------------------------
[image: DSCF3820-scaled.jpg]
An Israeli checkpoint east of Ramallah. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)

For three days, I was trapped in an area between three villages, no more
than a ten-minute drive apart. At the entrance to each of the three
villages, an actual iron gate blocked the road, quite literally caging in
their residents. This was how Palestinians in the West Bank were informed
of the new war that Israel started
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/israel-launches-unprecedented-attack-on-iranian-nuclear-sites/>
with Iran.

As soon as Israel launched its unprecedented attack, igniting the ongoing
war between the two states, media attention shifted immediately away from
the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the continuous Israeli offensive against
Palestinians in the West Bank.

It was a Friday when Israel started the war, the day when travel within the
West Bank is at its lowest, yet the effects of the Israeli lockdown on the
West Bank were felt immediately: the Israeli army announced that the West
Bank had been declared a closed military area, and checkpoints separating
the West Bank from Jerusalem were closed, even for those Palestinians who
have crossing permits. The Allenby border crossing with Jordan — the only
way out of the country for West Bank Palestinians — was also shut in both
directions.

Suddenly, the lockdown on the West Bank made it clear what we knew Israel
has been silently doing to the West Bank over the past several years: it
has turned Palestinian population centers into a network of connected
“cages,” which Israel is able to open and shut whenever it wants.

Israel illustrated its utter control over the territory with its escalating
war on Iran, closing almost all checkpoints between West Bank cities and
villages, including hundreds of its 900 checkpoints, iron gates, and
roadblocks.

In effect, they function as cages, like the three villages I was stuck in
when the war started. This means that we can’t access work, hospitals, or
anything in the city center — in the case of my village, that happens to be
Ramallah. This changed slightly on Monday, four days into the war between
Israel and Iran, when the gate at the northern end of my “cage,” separating
the three neighboring villages from the rest of the road to Ramallah, was
finally opened with occasional searches.

But on the southern end of the three-village cage, the gate remained
closed. It separates my village from the Allon road, an Israeli-built
street used by Israeli settlers. This road, and countless other Israeli
roads that cut through the West Bank, are all part of Israel’s plan to
effectively annex the West Bank while hiding the existence of Palestinians
from view.
[image: An iron gate east of Ramallah. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)]An
iron gate east of Ramallah. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss) *The
‘security’ roads meant for annexation*

The Allon road runs through the West Bank from north to south along the
eastern edges of the central hills of Nablus and Ramallah. Built by Israel
in the 1970s with the pretext of keeping the Jordan Valley under tight
Israeli military control “for security reasons,” the Allon road separates
Nablus and Ramallah from the Jordan Valley, marking the border where Israel
has since banned any Palestinian urban expansion. Israel has built dozens
of illegal settlements along that road. In 2019, when Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to annex the Jordan Valley, he showed a
map of the area slated for annexation, and it was none other than a repeat
of the Allon Plan of the late 1960s.

The brainchild of Israeli politician Yigal Allon, the Allon Plan proposed
to annex large swathes of the West Bank to Israel proper under the pretext
of fighting security threats coming from the east. At the time, this was
represented by the Palestinian *fedayeen*, who launched guerrilla attacks
across the Jordanian border, but they were driven out of Jordan in 1970,
well before the larger part of the Allon plan was implemented.

Following the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, Israel multiplied the construction
of Israeli-only roads (dubbed “bypass roads,” since they bypassed
Palestinian villages and towns and connected Israeli settlements to one
another). Israel began creating a system where two nations existed in the
same space: Palestinian native towns, villages, and cities, with their old
network of roads, and new Israeli settlements with their own separate
infrastructure. This was the basis for what the world later began to
recognize as an Apartheid system in the West Bank.

But some roads were just too difficult to replace or split. To this day,
Palestinians continue to be allowed to drive on parts of the Allon road, or
other roads like Road-1, which links the West Bank’s northern and southern
parts and passes by the Maale Adumim settlement east of Jerusalem.

But Israel has never had enough of segregating Palestinians, and it has
never run out of “security concerns” either.

Before October 2023, the Israeli government had been allocating millions of
shekels in infrastructure projects
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/04/israels-escalating-west-bank-assault-is-part-of-a-larger-plan-to-split-the-territory-in-two/>
in the West Bank aimed at completely separating Israeli settlers from
Palestinians on highways. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who
has been given extensive powers over the West Bank, has always defended
these projects as a security necessity, pointing to individual Palestinian
shooting attacks on Israeli settlers or soldiers. But Israeli leaders
occasionally admitted that their West Bank agenda was much more than
security.

In February 2022, hundreds of Israeli settlers rampaged
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/02/west-bank-dispatch-between-army-invasions-and-settler-pogroms-the-west-bank-rises/>
through the Palestinian town of Huwwara, south of Nablus, after a
Palestinian fatally shot two Israeli settlers
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/08/west-bank-dispatch-two-lone-wolf-operations-in-two-days/>
in the center of the town. Huwwara was one of the places where Palestinian
and Israeli circulation had never been split, and Israeli settlers in the
past had taken to shopping in the town due to its cheaper prices.
Immediately after the settler pogrom, Smotrich stated
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/03/bezalel-smotrich-doubles-down-on-support-for-wiping-out-huwwara/>
that Huwwara had to be “wiped out,” and that it was the Israeli army — not
the settlers — who should do it.

Shortly after, the Israeli army accelerated the building of a road parallel
to the one coming out of Nablus, in order to connect it to the Allon road
and prevent Israelis from crossing through Huwwara.

The project is massive, and it connects Israeli settlements east and west
of the current road, facilitating the movement of Israeli settlers between
the settlements south of Nablus. But it does much more than that: it
separates Palestinian villages from their lands on the other side of the
road — not annexing them officially, but making them inaccessible to their
Palestinian owners.
[image: Huwwara bypass road map. (Photo: Peace Now)]Huwwara bypass road
map. (Photo: Peace Now)

Jamal Jumaa, coordinator of the Palestinian grassroots Stop The Wall
campaign, told *Mondoweiss* that “the new road south of Nablus falls
perfectly in place with previous Israeli plans drafted since the early
1990s, and it connects with other similar projects in the same area and
beyond it in the West Bank.”

“The road in question connects with another road that the Israeli army is
building further to the south, which includes a large bus station for all
Israeli settlements in the Nablus and Ramallah areas to connect them to
Jerusalem,” Jumaa clarified. “Israel is building the infrastructure of a
state on Palestinian land.”

A similar project is being built in the south, from the Naqab desert
through Masafer Yatta in the south Hebron Hills, Jumaa says. It reaches the
southeastern edge of the Jerusalem desert. And yet another is the so-called
“Fabric of Life” road, Jumaa adds, which intends to ban Palestinian
vehicles from access to Road-1 and prevent them from maintaining a presence
in the area east of Jerusalem in the heart of the West Bank. “All these
projects connect with the larger network of Israeli infrastructure. They’re
connecting settlements with each other and the settlements with Israel
proper,” Jumaa explained.

“Simultaneously, these infrastructure projects isolate the Palestinian
population in limited areas, with underdeveloped infrastructure, basically
caging them in towns and villages under the full control of the Israeli
army,” he added.
[image: Israeli bulldozers working along Road-60, north of Ramallah.
(Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)]Israeli bulldozers working along Road-60,
north of Ramallah. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss) *Tightening the cage*

After October 2023, the Israeli army imposed a full closure of roads in the
West Bank, with checkpoints that had been completely open for several years
suddenly being completely closed. Israeli forces began to ease their
restrictions on Palestinian movement in February 2024, maintaining the
daily routine of the on-and-off closure of checkpoints.

But last January, immediately after reaching the ceasefire deal with Hamas
in Gaza, the Israeli army imposed dozens of new road blocks and iron gates
and closed most of those which had been opened. The impact was felt
immediately on the first day of the prisoners’ exchange between Israel and
Hamas, with Palestinian families taking hours to travel between cities nad
villages. In Hebron, a Palestinian woman in her forties died of a heart
attack at a checkpoint trying to reach the hospital.

Every weekend for six weeks — the days on which prisoners were set to be
released as part of the ceasefire — the gates closed, and the cage became a
palpable reality. Meanwhile, Israel was accelerating its construction work
on bypass roads north of Ramallah, south of Nablus, east of Jerusalem, and
around Hebron.

At the same time, the Israeli government was also advancing its annexation
strategy on the legal front. Just last month, Israel changed the land
ownership registration system
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/israel-just-reopened-land-property-registration-in-the-west-bank-heres-what-that-means/>
in the West Bank’s Area C, allowing for the legalization of dozens of
settler outposts that had been hitherto unrecognized by the Israeli
government, and facilitating the annexation of large swathes of Palestinian
public land for settlement expansion.

A month before that, Smotrich and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz
announced in a televised joint statement that they would accelerate the
demolition
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/05/israel-is-on-a-home-demolition-rampage-in-the-west-bank-its-aim-is-to-force-palestinians-to-leave/>
of Palestinian properties that don’t have Israeli building permits.
Smotrich added that Israel was coupling the demolition process with large
projects to “bring one million Israelis to Judea and Samaria,” the Israeli
term for the West Bank.

Then in early June, Israel announced the building of 22 new settlements
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/israel-just-took-another-huge-step-towards-west-bank-annexation-explained/>,
many of which are already-existing settler outposts that will receive
government recognition, services, infrastructure, and more land to expand.
Jamal Jumaa points out that “the development, expansion, and connection of
these settler outposts and new settlements is the real purpose of all the
infrastructure projects, which are often justified under ‘security’
reasons.”

“It is one big project, and it is about annexation and the segregation of
Palestinians,” Jumaa said.

As Israel continues its new war on Iran, it prolongs these “security”
measures even further, using the war to accelerate annexation. Forced to
check on social media groups for the situation of the roads, I find myself
planning my day around the opening and closure of the gates to my home
village. Meanwhile, less than ten kilometers on the other side of the gate,
Israeli settlers are establishing a new outpost on land that my family used
to farm and no longer has access to, while Israeli army bulldozers continue
to work around the clock to build them a new road. They will be able to
drive on it without seeing us and being reminded of our existence.
------------------------------

*Qassam Muaddi *
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. Follow him on
Twitter/X at @QassaMMuaddi <https://twitter.com/QassaMMuaddi>.
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