Israel’s ‘Crimson Thread’ military barrier is strangling the West Bank
A new military barrier in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley is cutting off Palestinian communities from their land, with settlers reaping the benefits. Ras al-Ahmar
A new military barrier in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley is cutting off Palestinian communities from their land, with settlers reaping the benefits. Ras al-Ahmar, occupied West Bank – The drive to Thaer Bisharat’s home should take less than 10 minutes from the main road. Instead, it took three hours. Every gate leading into Ras al-Ahmar, in the northern Jordan Valley, is shut these days. Such road closures have become the norm rather than the exception, patrolled in shifts by Israeli soldiers and settlers whose roles on the ground have become increasingly difficult to tell apart. The sole access point that remained was a single, winding dirt road, passable only by four-wheel drive vehicles and requiring drivers to evade the roving Israeli patrols. During the drive to Thaer’s house, Israeli forces had the area under an even greater lockdown than normal as they were nearby in the al-Buqaia plain, destroying three wells belonging to local Palestinians – including one owned by a relative of Thaer’s. This is some of the most fertile land in the occupied West Bank, where farmers normally tend rows of banana trees alongside crops such as grapes, olives and potatoes. But along the dirt road leading to Thaer’s isolated home, the farms stand half-abandoned, with plastic greenhouse doors open and flapping in the breeze, as crops go thirsty after water was cut off in the area weeks ago by Israeli authorities. “I can’t even run an errand,” said Thaer. “From Tamun, the village, it used to take me ten minutes. Now, with the current [dirt] road… it takes an hour, at best.” He was spending the afternoon alone – his brother and sister-in-law had gone into town that morning for basic necessities. Left by himself, it was easy to feel like a sitting duck. “Just this morning, there was a car – two people in it, dressed in military gear, army-backed,” he said. “They went to the people living near the banana houses. They took down ID photos, names, phone numbers. And they tell them, ‘You’ve got 24 hours to leave. Otherwise we’re coming to confiscate everything you’ve got’.” In recent weeks, that pressure has escalated from long-standing “closed military zone” orders issued by the military into outright seizures of private land, alongside the destruction of irrigation pipes, water wells and greenhouses in the barrier’s path – the sharpest expression yet of an advancing takeover in which settler-outpost expansion and land seizure now work in tandem to squeeze out the Palestinians who remain.
“They cage us in and suffocate us,” Thaer said. A trench, an outpost and a series of seizure orders That tightening isolation is the result of one of Israel’s newest infrastructure projects in the occupied West Bank: the ‘Crimson Thread’ barrier. Announced in 2025, the first part of the project combines a trench and military road running roughly 22km between the Ein Shibli and Tayasir checkpoints – severing the northern Jordan Valley from Tubas to the north and Nablus to the south. Israel says it is intended to prevent weapons smuggling from Jordan, but the route runs several kilometres inside the occupied West Bank rather than along the already-fenced Jordanian border. The plan is for the barrier to eventually run for 500km, splitting Palestinians from thousands of hectares of land and creating a barrier that – in its consequences – mirrors the separation wall on the other side of the West Bank. On March 8, Israeli military commander Gilad Shriki visited several Palestinian communities, and, in their words, warned residents they should leave in preparation for a complete Israeli takeover of the area. Then, last month, an Israeli Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for construction of the ‘Crimson Thread’ barrier to proceed. Since then, the Israeli Civil Administration has moved aggressively. Roughly three kilometres of trenches have already been dug, destroying Palestinian infrastructure in its path – including irrigation pipes, farmland and greenhouses, all while severing farmers from land on the other side. The route of the ‘Crimson Thread’ project was stitched together with nine land seizure orders – a “clear escalation” of a decades-long effort by Israeli authorities to remove Palestinians in the area, according to Dror Etkes, who tracks Israeli land policy for Israeli NGO Kerem Navot. What started as checkpoints, settlement building and the designation of Palestinian lands as military firing zones “have in recent years become much more aggressive – through settler attacks, military raids, confiscation of property and denial of access to firing zones”. Now, such military land seizure orders allow Israeli authorities to “seize whatever land it deems necessary” for security purposes, says Etkes. According to the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission, Israeli authorities issued 49 military land-seizure orders in the first half of this year – already exceeding the 47 issued in all of 2025. Thaer scoffs at the official rationale. “It’s not a military road,” he said. “You don’t dig a trench two and a half, three metres deep for that.” ‘Effectively in a prison’ Etkes said the barrier accomplishes two things at once: “blocking Palestinians’ ability to enter everything east of the barrier” – where most of their farmland is – while linking existing illegal settlements to a new outpost being built along the route, on Jabal Tamun, that he expects to further impact 8-9,000 dunams (8 to 9sq km) of Palestinian agricultural land, most of it in Area B.
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