Israel is building a tunnel to cut off Palestinians from the heart of the West Bank
E1 and the planned Fabric of Life road. (Peace Now map)
Qassam Muaddi reports in Mondoweiss on 23 June 2025 :
One underground tunnel will soon be the only connection between 1.5 million Palestinians in the southern West Bank and the rest of the territory. This recently approved infrastructure plan, dubbed the “Fabric of Life” project, would effectively split the West Bank into two.
Transportation for Palestinians in the Bethlehem and Hebron governorates to Jericho in the Jordan Valley would go through a new underground tunnel Israel is planning to build to bypass the wilderness east of Jerusalem. What this means is that the entire space between Jerusalem and the edges of the Jordan Valley would become accessible to Israelis only.
The project, approved by the Israeli government earlier this month, will cost $90 billion, which Israel plans to cover from a special fund it feeds with pirated Palestinian customs money collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA). These funds are ostensibly meant for development projects for the Palestinian population in the West Bank, but the project isn’t about the improvement of Palestinian transportation — it’s about the consolidation of Israeli control over the geographic area of the West Bank east of Jerusalem. The Fabric of Life project would effectively ban any Palestinian circulation in this zone.
The larger context of the Fabric of Life is only one piece in Israel’s larger “Greater Jerusalem” development plans, which Israel first laid out in the early 2000s under then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The idea is simple; connect East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in 1981 and treats like a part of its territory, to a series of Israeli settlements which extend east of the city through the Jerusalem desert, reaching the very edge of the Jordan Valley. This would transform the some 12-square kilometers in the West Bank targeted by this project into an extension of the eastern limits of Jerusalem. On Israeli maps, this is known as the E-1 area, which stands for “East-1.”
This strip of land, which is 35 kilometers long and 25 kilometers wide, would become a part of Israel proper, cutting through the West Bank from West to East.
In 2007, Israel approved another similar project, dubbed the “Sovereignty Road,” which includes building another underground tunnel that runs under Israel’s Road-1 connecting the southern West Bank to the center, making it the only available route to Palestinians and clearing the road above ground for exclusive Israeli use.
As the Sovereignty Road bypasses the eastern periphery of Jerusalem, which represents Palestinian continuity between the center and the south, the Fabric of Life would bypass the wilderness to the east, which represents Palestinian continuity between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. Together, both projects would drain the entire West Bank area east of Jerusalem of Palestinian circulation, isolating the Palestinian communities still living there.
How the underground roads project started
The revival of the “Greater Jerusalem” project came under the current right-wing coalition of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been rushing to accomplish the annexation of the West Bank at an accelerating rate under the pretext of the current war on Gaza, which Israel launched following the October 7 attacks. But three years before the attacks, in 2021, the Israeli government advanced the first part of the Fabric of Life road project.
At the time, Netanyahu’s government approved the allocation of 14 million shekels (about $4.6 million) to begin the first phase of the project, which consisted of isolating two Palestinian communities in the eastern periphery of Jerusalem: al-Aizariyah and Abu Dis. The two towns, which have virtually merged into one over the years, are located at the junction point of both the Sovereignty and Fabric of Life tunnel projects.