The Wall’s construction started in 2002 to advance Israel’s annexation policies and to refine its apartheid regime over the Palestinian people. It does not surround the occupied West Bank but rather cuts deep into the occupied territory, expanding Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and resources.
While Israel is heading for de jure annexation, the Wall is an important tool of Israel’s illegal and ongoing de facto annexation. The Wall’s path and its associated regime are planned to de facto annex some 46% of the West Bank, isolating communities into Bantustans, ghettos and “military zones.”
The International Court of Justice in its 2004 ruling on the illegality of Israel’s Wall in the occupied West Bank stated that “the Court considers the construction of the wall and its associated régime create a “fait accompli” on the ground that could become permanent, in which case, and notwithstanding the formal characterization of the wall by Israel, it would be tantamount to de facto annexation.“
Israel’s Walls aim to enclose the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including almost 1.5 million refugees, on only 12% of their historic homeland.
The Wall literally cements the existence of segregated reserves and ghettos for Palestinians, one of the elements defining the crime of apartheid. These bantustans mirror both the structure used by the South African apartheid regime to relegate the Black population into unsustainable, segregated areas, and the confinement of Indigenous peoples to isolated reservations by other settler colonial states, which also served as the model for the development of the bantustan system.
The apartheid Wall is complemented by a complicated, roughly 1,660 km long system of ‘apartheid roads’ in the West Bank that systematically destroy the Palestinian road network while imposing a different road network for Israelis that Palestinians from the West Bank are not allowed to access