Israel ‘strangles’ West Bank amid war on Iran

It is the thirteenth day of the holy month of Ramadan, and Palestinian roads in the West Bank are almost empty at sunset as people break their fast. Since the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran started last Saturday, the Israeli army has closed all checkpoints between Palestinian towns and cities, paralyzing movement.

The road closures came amid unprecedented economic pressure. Around 160,000 Palestinians who worked as daily laborers in Israel or Israeli settlements before October 7, 2023, have had their work permits revoked by Israel. In addition, the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is the largest employer in the West Bank, hasn’t been able to pay full salaries for two years, since Israel continues to withhold customs funds that it collects on behalf of the PA in accordance with the 1993 Oslo Accords.

But this Ramadan, Palestinians are also facing a new surge in settler violence, crippling their access to what remains of their lands, largely away from international attention.

Road blocks

On the first day of the war, the Israeli army installed a new iron gate on the road between the towns of Deir Jarir and Silwad, northeast of Ramallah. Along with another iron gate at the other end of Silwad, installed during the first Gaza ceasefire in January of last year, the Palestinian town has become virtually trapped in a cage.

With some 8,000 inhabitants, Silwad is the commercial and administrative center of the eastern Ramallah area, with a courthouse, an emergency medical center, a public registration office, and multiple commercial centers serving 12 Palestinian villages. More importantly, since the Israeli army blocked most of the roads in October 2023, Silwad has become the only way for around 28,000 Palestinians to reach Ramallah.

Near the town’s main roundabout, a small soft drinks shop is open, with only two customers inside. It would usually be full after Iftar on a Ramadan evening, but this Ramadan is different. “It’s not just the closure, “Ahmad, the shop owner, tells Mondoweiss. “Things have already been very difficult for people this year. Even before the war broke out, families had been saving every shekel.”

Travel has also become unpredictable since the war started, Ahmad says, with soldiers closing the gate and searching cars for hours every day. “Fewer people stop by, and now with the new gate on the other side of town, we will be even more isolated,” he pointed out. “The occupation is strangling us, separating each town and village.”

As soon as the war on Iran started, the Israeli army announced the closure of all checkpoints across the West Bank. These included the Zaatara checkpoint, halfway between Ramallah and Nablus in the north, and “the Container” checkpoint between Ramallah and Bethlehem to the south. These checkpoints are the primary nodes connecting the three main regions of the West Bank — north, center, and south. Shutting them down has hermetically sealed West Bank cities, while the countryside is blockaded through the tightening of hundreds of local checkpoints and iron gates, much like the ones around Silwad.

The Israeli army partially reopened some of these gates after the fourth day of the war on Tuesday, maintaining closures for hours at a time during the day and only periodically opening them to ease a fraction of the congestion. The situation became so unpredictable that the PA decreed last Tuesday that schools were to be closed and classes held online. Only employees who couldn’t work from home were to be called to work.

No access to Jerusalem

Simultaneously, the Israeli army sealed off the West Bank entirely, adding to the strangulation. Palestinians were unable to travel to Jerusalem or abroad via the Allenby Bridge, which connects the West Bank to Jordan, for five days. Even before the war, Israel had drastically restricted the access of Palestinians from the West Bank to Jerusalem, an unprecedented measure during Ramadan.

The Israeli army had previously announced that only Palestinians younger than 12 and older than 50 for women and 55 for men were considered eligible for an entry permit to visit al-Aqsa Mosque. Only 10,000 permits were granted. In previous years, Palestinians of these age groups were allowed into Jerusalem without a permit during Ramadan.

After the war, even these limited permissions were revoked wholesale.

“Praying at Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan is an important part of celebrating the holy month for us,” Ahmad, the shop-owner, said. “We knew that this year, entry to Jerusalem would be more restricted than before. But when the war began, they revoked everything.”

He added that his brother had brain surgery scheduled in Jerusalem and had gone through the full process to obtain a permit, including submitting a report from the Israeli doctor who was supposed to operate on him. The permit was finally approved, he said, but it was also revoked, just as his brother was preparing for the operation.

Settler violence surges

The didn’t only bring with it tightening restrictions and blanket closures. It also emboldened groups of Israeli settlers to launch attacks on villages in the countryside. Five minutes from Silwad, in the town of Taybeh, a resident who asked not to be named described what they said was the largest settler incursion yet into the town, which took place on the second day of the war.

According to the resident, about eight settlers arrived by car carrying sticks and drove all the way into the center of Taybeh, something they said settlers had previously done only on the outskirts. The group moved through the town for nearly an hour while Israeli soldiers watched from roughly a hundred meters away. Residents stayed indoors or kept their distance as settlers damaged a parked car and stole two horses from a nearby stable before leaving.

“For about an hour, life in the town was paralyzed,” the resident said, as people avoided the settlers out of fear of being attacked or drawn into a confrontation. That would have ended with Israeli soldiers intervening and making arrests. Incidents like these, the resident added, are increasingly part of “daily life,” leaving residents feeling that there is “no safety” even in a town long considered peaceful.

The attack on Taybeh isn’t an isolated incident. Israeli settlers have intensified their raids on Palestinian villages and the outskirts of towns across the West Bank.

In the village of Qusra, east of Nablus, settlers attacked Palestinian farmers and Israeli peace activists accompanying them last Friday, only a day before the war began. They were beaten with sticks, sending at least one person to the hospital. Three days later, the village was targeted in another settler pogrom. According to the village’s social media pages, the attack left an elderly resident injured.

In the nearby village of Qaryout, also east of Nablus, settlers opened fire on Palestinians during an attack on Monday, the third day of the war. Two brothers were killed near their home, Fahim and Muhammad Muammer, ages 48 and 51.

In Masafer Yatta in the south Hebron Hills, residents say Israeli settler violence has become a near-daily occurrence in the area since last week. Incidents have included raids on homes, the harassment of families, shootings at farmers, shepherds being driven from grazing lands, and releasing livestock onto Palestinians’ property in order to damage their agriculture.

Meanwhile, the PA’s settlement watchdog, the National Bureau for the Defense of Land (NBDL), reported on Saturday that the Israeli government had begun discussing a plan to build over 1,300 settlement housing units in the Qalqilya governorate in the northwestern West Bank. The project would narrow the distance between two major settlements in the area.

According to the NBDL, the Israeli cabinet has recently shifted from its previous practice of approving settlement projects four times a year to holding weekly meetings for that purpose. The Bureau described the move as the normalization and acceleration of “de facto annexation.”

Earlier in mid-February, Israel’s hardline Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who also oversees the military administration of the West Bank, said in a public speech that Israel should annex the entire territory and “encourage migration” of Palestinians. For Ahmad, the shop owner in Silwad, such policies are already being implemented in practice. It entails making life increasingly unlivable for Palestinians in the West Bank.

“It seems like everything they do is irreversible,” Ahmad said. “Every road blocked and every meter of land taken is definitive, and it only seems to get worse every day.” If such measures drew little reaction “when the whole world was watching” at the height of the Gaza genocide, he added, Israel is now likely to accelerate these policies even further, while global attention is focused on a major regional war.