Reportage
In the West Bank, new roads for an old apartheid
Violence is rooted even at the level of infrastructure. ‘Where the separate roads are forced to meet, they build a tunnel. Not a bridge: Palestinians must stay below, unseen, posing no threat and rendered invisible.’
In the absence of official information, one is left to rely on imagination and, most of all, the experience of decades of segregation: in the occupied West Bank, the massive scale of road construction undertaken by Israel since October 7, 2023, is anything but random.
Meter by meter, bulldozers are transforming the road network in an enormous engineering project that cements the definitive annexation of occupied Palestinian territory.
In the southern West Bank, Road 60, the main artery connecting Bethlehem to Hebron, is being doubled in capacity. It had two lanes – now it has two more, still under construction. The machinery is idle – it’s Saturday. Work will resume on Sunday; it never stopped, not even during the height of the offensive in Gaza.
“Anyone who thought Israel was too busy with other things was wrong. It hasn't taken its foot off the gas for a single minute,” comments Muna, a local resident, as she accompanies us along Road 60. She points to the newly installed lampposts and then to the tunnels. Palestinian cars with green license plates (from the Occupied Territories) will have to travel underground, prohibited from going past the entrances to Israeli settlements, which are accessible only to settlers.
“They are widening the roads to create two parallel systems: one will be reserved for Israelis, the other for Palestinians. A wall will be built in the middle,” Muna continues. “They don't even want to see us. They don't want a Palestinian car waiting at a traffic light next to one belonging to a settler. And where the separate roads are forced to meet, they build a tunnel. Not a bridge: Palestinians must stay below, unseen, posing no threat and rendered invisible.”
One such tunnel already exists nearby, connecting the Palestinian village of Beit Jala to Nahalin and Husam. At the end of the underpass, which is flooded from the incessant rain of recent days, a yellow gate gives the Israeli army total control: they need only close it to isolate one town from the others.
To expand Road 60, Israel has used its well-known policy: confiscating Palestinian land. In the section heading south from the Efrat settlement, the village of al-Khader lost its agricultural plots. They were leveled. Beyond the new roadway lies the memory of what was there before: terraced olive groves, vineyards and citrus orchards, now completely cut off from their owners, unusable.
A little further south, approaching the Gush Etzion settler complex, the panorama is identical: construction equipment, a doubled roadway, and infrastructure ready to enforce separation. To the north, it is the same. At the entrance to Ramallah, a tunnel has appeared; Palestinians must use it to reach the city from the south while settlers speed along the road above them.
And further north, in Nablus, the Huwwara checkpoint – once one of the most feared, notorious for soldier violence and a record number of killings over the years – is now a ghost zone. The new road for Palestinians has been built over piles of earth amassed by Israeli bulldozers for months on end.
The list is long, but there is only one overarching objective, summarized in the planned “Fabric of Life Road” project. This “sovereignty road” will divert Palestinian traffic around the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, the heart of the E1 colonial expansion plan. Here, too, the roads will be separate, preventing Palestinians from passing in front of Ma’ale Adumim, while the adjacent highway takes settlers to the center of Jerusalem in minutes.
The Israeli government provides only a trickle of information, avoiding any possible public scrutiny (however unlikely). What is certain is the enormous budget invested to rebuild the West Bank’s road system: in July, $274.6 million were approved for infrastructure projects in favor of settlers. It is no coincidence that this came just hours after a Knesset vote on imposing Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.
The funding was requested by Transport Minister Miri Regev and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to expand connections between settlements, and between settlements and Israeli territory. Regev has described the project as practical steps towards annexation. Smotrich added: “This is how you achieve true sovereignty. With facts on the ground, with settlement investments, and by bringing in one million new settlers. The fantasy of a terrorist Palestinian state is being dismantled.”
In 2024, the Netanyahu government financed road infrastructure with an even larger budget: $838 million. In just 12 months, during the genocide in Gaza, this resulted in 116.4 kilometers of asphalt, totaling 139 new illegal roads.
These figures were released a few months ago by the Israeli association Peace Now. The group adds that at least two-thirds of this construction, 75 km, occurred on confiscated private Palestinian land; seven kilometers were in Area B (theoretically under Palestinian civil control); and about 40 km serve only the settlements. These are the “bypass roads,” roadways completely forbidden to Palestinians.
“The colonial project is a triangle; each side fortifies the entire structure,” explains Palestinian analyst Suhail Khalilieh. “It's not just about building new housing units. From the outset, Israel understood that in order to transfer citizens to the settlements, it had to make it convenient, and so it invested in the other two sides: industrial zones in the settlements, now 23 of them; and roads, an efficient network for moving quickly and avoiding Palestinian towns.”
“The settlement project flourished when Israel invested heavily in infrastructure during and after the First Intifada,” Khalilieh continues. “Today, it is aiming at a new level: creating two totally separate road systems for Palestinians and Israelis.” This new era, he notes, completely redraws the map of the West Bank into three strips: a western one, which Israel intends to annex; an eastern one (the Jordan Valley), already 95% under Israeli control; and a central strip, where Tel Aviv is handing control to extremist settlers. “Ben Gvir, as security minister, supplies the settler militias with hundreds of thousands of weapons, and Smotrich is working to transfer the management of the Civil Administration to the Settler Council.”
These road policies are inextricably linked to the military offensive. In the hours after the October 7 attack, soldiers began sealing off access routes to Palestinian communities. In the first weeks, this was done with rudimentary means, with concrete blocks and mounds of earth.
Then the gates appeared – dozens, then hundreds, installed inside villages and along their perimeters. One soldier is now enough to control an entire community. “The worsening of oppression goes through isolation,” Muna adds, “and it is closely linked to settler violence: the army closes the gates, the settlers attack, and Palestinians from nearby towns cannot intervene to help those being assaulted.”
The color of the gates tells their purpose. The orange gates, located outside villages on the bypass roads, have been locked for months. The yellow gates, installed between communities, are closed and reopened without warning, on military orders. According to the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, there are currently 849 roadblocks in the West Bank, including 288 gates. Other sources count 1,200.
Daily life – education, work, health – depends entirely on the whim of the occupier and the pervasive uncertainty of whether one will find a yellow gate open. Palestinians now rely on Telegram and WhatsApp chats for real-time updates on whether they can pass or are now isolated.
“The size of the road works Israel is carrying out is producing irreversible facts. The occupation has never stopped, not even for a day. Now it has only accelerated,” concludes Khalilieh. The road to annexation is now paved; the road to apartheid has already reached its destination.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/cisgiordania-nuove-strade-vecchia-apartheid on 2025-11-16