How Israel is using the war with Iran to accelerate its annexation of the West Bank
An iron gate east of Ramallah. An iron gate east of Ramallah.
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 18 June 2025 :
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 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.