Press Releases
18/9/2025
Since 7 October 2023, the Israeli regime has sharply expanded the installation of iron gates across the West Bank. The iron gates can be closed at will, without warning, turning entire cities, villages or neighborhoods into enclaves overnight. This development is part of the Israeli regime's strategy of ultimately erasing and eliminating Palestinian presence, through further fragmentation, isolation and suffocation, rooted in the long-established apartheid structure and recent so-called Decisive Plan. These gates are a clear, on-the-ground indicator of a systematic regime designed to inflict full domination over all of Palestine and to confine Palestinian communities into what can be understood as enclaves.
From this context, enclaves are Palestinian communities subjected to fragmentation and isolation under a system of colonial-apartheid. These enclaves are physically and socially disconnected from surrounding areas and are subjected to constant restrictions and control, entrenching the broader strategy of domination, suffocation, and the erasure of Palestinian presence.
According to a rapid survey conducted by OCHA (Jan–Feb 2025), there were 849 movement obstacles that permanently or intermittently restricted the movement of 3.3 million Palestinians across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the “H2” area of Hebron. Among them were 205 iron gates, which OCHA categorizes as road gates. These figures only reflect the situation up to February; since then, the number of iron gates and other obstacles has climbed to nearly 1,000. With new iron gates installed daily as reported by The New Arab and Al Jazeera, the number is hard to track as their installation is rapidly spreading across the West Bank, deepening fragmentation and the coercive environment.
These gates isolate cities from one another and disconnect villages and communities internally, severely restricting Palestinians movement, enhancing Israeli domination, cutting people off from education, healthcare, workplaces and farmland. By strangling livelihoods, the gates create unbearable conditions that push communities toward displacement, serving the Israeli regime's main pillars of survival: forced displacement and transfer, colonization and apartheid.
The spread of new iron gates across the West Bank shows an onground policy aimed at enhancing and perpetuating the Israeli regime's colonial domination. At Al-Eizariya, next to the Ma’ale Adumim colony, a newly iron gate illustrates the “E1” colony plan in action: splitting the West Bank in half. Similar tactics are visible in Hebron, where Israeli forces raided 20 schools in August, confiscated books, and soon after placed an iron gate, blocking hundreds of students and teachers. Along “Road 60,” the main south-north highway cutting through the West Bank, wired fences have turned into dozens of iron gates installed in 2025, closing in thousands of Palestinians in the Ramallah and Nablus governorates. Across the West Bank this pattern is the same: villages isolated, cities divided, entire areas transformed into enclaves that make Palestinian life unsustainable.
The Decisive Plan, proposed by Bezalel Smotrich, and adopted by the current Israeli administration envisions six municipal “self-governing” regions: Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jericho, Nablus and Jenin; with the Israeli regime retaining full control. Iron gates, checkpoints and other movement obstacles form the physical infrastructure of this vision, carving the West Bank into sealed enclaves and presenting fragmentation and isolation as “local governance,” while effectively working to disturb daily life and services, suppress resistance and intensify land confiscation.
Just as Gaza has been turned into an isolated, suffocated strip under permanent closure, Palestinians in the West Bank are increasingly being confined through gates and barriers. What is reported as the suffocation of the West Bank is far more than the disruption of daily life. It is the systematic fragmentation and isolation of land and communities into Palestinian enclaves, deliberately reshaping geography to pave the way for Israeli regime domination. Forcible displacement and depopulation are not just side effects but necessary precursors for Israeli colonial expansion and full enforcement of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, to actualize the Decisive Plan.
The simultaneity of these measures in the West Bank under the Decisive Plan, alongside the ongoing genocide in Gaza and future aims to implement Trump’s “GREAT” Plan, demonstrates once again a single colonial-apartheid regime trying to impose sovereignty on the maximum amount of land with the minimum number of Palestinians.
Ending Palestinian forced displacement, fragmentation and land confiscation requires the imposition of the full range of economic, military and political sanctions to dismantle the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime. Without this, Palestinian presence will continue to be erased.