Press Releases
(Bethlehem 12 February 2026)
The term “checkpoint” fails to capture the scale and intentionality of the comprehensive Israeli closure apparatus that has been constructed in the West Bank. Iron gates, earth mounds, roadblocks, permanent and flying checkpoints, and a segregated road system that together fragment Palestinian space and regulate every axis of movement. This infrastructure does not merely restrict mobility – it reorganizes territory and people. Israeli-only bypass roads, built to circumvent Palestinian areas, facilitate land confiscation, consolidate colony expansion, and carve Palestinian communities into enclaves. Under the Israeli regime’s Decisive Plan, these roads and the closure apparatus serve as tools to sever, fragment, and isolate Palestinian communities while ensuring seamless territorial contiguity for Israeli colonies across mandatory Palestine.
Navigating the West Bank today means constantly scanning phones for closure updates and reconstructing a shifting map of alternative routes simply to move between neighborhoods or towns. This spatial apartheid is visible in the highway network. Route 60 – the major north–south artery linking Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron – operates as a protected corridor for Israeli colonizers while serving as a barrier for Palestinians. Its evolution demonstrates how infrastructure and closure work in tandem. Between 1986 and 1995, the Israeli regime imposed prolonged curfews and blocked all but one exit from Dheisheh refugee camp, adjacent to the Jerusalem–Hebron road (now Route 60), sealing residents off from direct access to the highway. Control over the road meant control over the camp’s economic, social, and political life. What was tested as localized containment has since been systematized. Today, segregated lanes, tunnels, walls, and controlled access points transform major roads into instruments of permanent containment – fragmenting Palestinian territory while ensuring uninterrupted Israeli colonial contiguity.
Route 4370 – widely known as the “Apartheid Road” – makes this logic explicit. Built in 2019 and divided by an eight-meter-high concrete wall separating Palestinian and Israeli traffic, the road institutionalizes physical segregation as Israeli regime policy. Planned extensions through the so-called “Fabric of Life” road aim to integrate colonies such as Ma’ale Adumim and the E1 corridor toward Jerusalem and 1948 Palestine, tightening colony connectivity while deepening Palestinian fragmentation and isolation. These projects are not transportation initiatives; they are mechanisms for incorporating confiscated land into a continuous colonial grid while isolating Palestinians to disconnected enclaves.
The closure regime operates in tandem with this segregated road network to consolidate Palestinian enclaves. As of May 2025, at least 849 movement obstacles were documented across the West Bank – a figure that continued to rise, with additional gates and roadblocks installed throughout September 2025. In April 2025, Israeli colonial forces installed three new Iron gates at the entrances to Turmus’ayya in Ramallah governorate and As Sawiya and Qabalan in Nablus governorate. Two of these gates severed direct access for more than 15,000 Palestinians to Route 60. Since November 2025, iron gates at Al-‘Arrub refugee camp and Beit Ummar (both in the Hebron Governorate) have been fully sealed, cutting residents off from surrounding towns and denying access to the Al-‘Arrub bypass road – itself constructed through the confiscation of 401 dunams of Palestinian land. Road infrastructure seizes land; closures prevent access to what remains. These measures operate within a broader matrix of barriers that force Palestinian movement into controlled detours while preserving seamless territorial continuity between colonies.
States must impose immediate, comprehensive structural sanctions on the entirety of the Israeli regime to halt and dismantle its apartheid infrastructure which brings with it systematic dispossession, fragmentation, and forced displacement that is accelerating through the formation of enclaves as dictated in the Decisive Plan.