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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">How Israel is using the war with Iran to accelerate its annexation of the West Bank</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Qassam Muaddi</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time">June 18, 2025</div>
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<img src="cid:ii_mc3ex9lx0" alt="DSCF3820-scaled.jpg" width="467" height="277"><br>
<font size="1">An Israeli checkpoint east of Ramallah. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)
</font><br><p>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 <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/israel-launches-unprecedented-attack-on-iranian-nuclear-sites/">new war that Israel started</a> with Iran.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 \u2014 the only way out of the country for West
Bank Palestinians \u2014 was also shut in both directions.</p>
<p>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 \u201ccages,\u201d which Israel is able to open and shut whenever it
wants. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In effect, they function as cages, like the three villages I was
stuck in when the war started. This means that we can\u2019t access work,
hospitals, or anything in the city center \u2014 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 \u201ccage,\u201d separating the three neighboring villages from the rest of
the road to Ramallah, was finally opened with occasional searches. </p>
<p>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\u2019s plan to
effectively annex the West Bank while hiding the existence of
Palestinians from view.</p>
<img width="467" height="263" src="https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/DSCF4336-1024x576.jpg" alt="An iron gate east of Ramallah. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;">An iron gate east of Ramallah. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)
<h2><strong>The \u2018security\u2019 roads meant for annexation</strong></h2>
<p>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 \u201cfor security reasons,\u201d 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>fedayeen</em>, 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.</p>
<p>Following the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, Israel multiplied the
construction of Israeli-only roads (dubbed \u201cbypass roads,\u201d 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. </p>
<p>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\u2019s northern
and southern parts and passes by the Maale Adumim settlement east of
Jerusalem. </p>
<p>But Israel has never had enough of segregating Palestinians, and it has never run out of \u201csecurity concerns\u201d either.</p>
<p>Before October 2023, the Israeli government had been allocating millions of shekels in <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/04/israels-escalating-west-bank-assault-is-part-of-a-larger-plan-to-split-the-territory-in-two/">infrastructure projects</a>
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.</p>
<p>In February 2022, hundreds of Israeli settlers <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/02/west-bank-dispatch-between-army-invasions-and-settler-pogroms-the-west-bank-rises/">rampaged</a> through the Palestinian town of Huwwara, south of Nablus, after a Palestinian <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/08/west-bank-dispatch-two-lone-wolf-operations-in-two-days/">fatally shot two Israeli settlers</a>
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, <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/03/bezalel-smotrich-doubles-down-on-support-for-wiping-out-huwwara/">Smotrich stated</a> that Huwwara had to be \u201cwiped out,\u201d and that it was the Israeli army \u2014 not the settlers \u2014 who should do it. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 \u2014 not annexing them officially, but making them
inaccessible to their Palestinian owners.</p>
<img width="467" height="330" src="https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Hawara-bypass-1-1024x724.jpeg" alt="Huwwara bypass road map. (Photo: Peace Now)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;">Huwwara bypass road map. (Photo: Peace Now)
<p>Jamal Jumaa, coordinator of the Palestinian grassroots Stop The Wall campaign, told <em>Mondoweiss</em>
that \u201cthe 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.\u201d</p>
<p>\u201cThe 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,\u201d Jumaa clarified. \u201cIsrael is building the
infrastructure of a state on Palestinian land.\u201d</p>
<p>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 \u201cFabric of Life\u201d 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. \u201cAll these projects connect with the larger network of
Israeli infrastructure. They\u2019re connecting settlements with each other
and the settlements with Israel proper,\u201d Jumaa explained.</p>
<p>\u201cSimultaneously, 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,\u201d he added.</p>
<img width="467" height="263" src="https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/DSCF4351-1024x576.jpg" alt="Israeli bulldozers working along Road-60, north of Ramallah. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;">Israeli bulldozers working along Road-60, north of Ramallah. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)
<h2><strong>Tightening the cage</strong></h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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\u2019 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.</p>
<p>Every weekend for six weeks \u2014 the days on which prisoners were set to
be released as part of the ceasefire \u2014 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. </p>
<p>At the same time, the Israeli government was also advancing its annexation strategy on the legal front. Just last month, Israel <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/israel-just-reopened-land-property-registration-in-the-west-bank-heres-what-that-means/">changed the land ownership registration system</a>
in the West Bank\u2019s 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. </p>
<p>A month before that, Smotrich and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced in a televised joint statement that they would <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/05/israel-is-on-a-home-demolition-rampage-in-the-west-bank-its-aim-is-to-force-palestinians-to-leave/">accelerate the demolition</a>
of Palestinian properties that don\u2019t have Israeli building permits.
Smotrich added that Israel was coupling the demolition process with
large projects to \u201cbring one million Israelis to Judea and Samaria,\u201d the
Israeli term for the West Bank.</p>
<p>Then in early June, Israel announced the <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/israel-just-took-another-huge-step-towards-west-bank-annexation-explained/">building of 22 new settlements</a>,
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 \u201cthe 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 \u2018security\u2019 reasons.\u201d </p>
<p>\u201cIt is one big project, and it is about annexation and the segregation of Palestinians,\u201d Jumaa said.</p>
<p>As Israel continues its new war on Iran, it prolongs these \u201csecurity\u201d
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.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Qassam Muaddi </strong><br>Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter/X at <a href="https://twitter.com/QassaMMuaddi">@QassaMMuaddi</a>.</p>
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