On March 29, 2025, Israel’s Security Cabinet approved the next phase of construction of a separate road system for Palestinians and Israelis in the occupied West Bank, last advanced in 2019. The newly expanded segregated highway will close off access to Jerusalem for Palestinians holding Palestinian Authority IDs, requiring them to take a special bypass route. The apartheid road would also close off the Israeli settlement bloc of Ma‘ale Adumim and surrounding Palestinian lands east of Jerusalem for these Palestinians, thereby effectively de facto annexing this large portion of the West Bank to Israel.1 This blocks Palestinian national authorities from recruiting the potential development of the central metropolitan core of the West Bank (Ramallah-East Jerusalem-Bethlehem).

On the other hand, the new road will facilitate and ease the way for Israeli settlers commuting between Ma‘ale Adumim and other settlements to Jerusalem, and accelerate the spread of a wedge of Jewish settlements through the heart of the West Bank.

The cabinet approved the allocation of NIS 335 million (approximately $91 million) for the construction of what Israel euphemistically refers to as the “Fabric of Life Road,” a Palestinian-only bypass road to be built between the Palestinian towns of al-‘Izariyya and al-Za‘ayim south of East 1 (or E1), the Israeli designation for a section of the West Bank along the eastern edge of East Jerusalem.

Palestinians have long used Road 1, the main highway in this area, to travel between the southern and northern sections of the West Bank—from Bethlehem to Abu Dis and al-‘Izariyya, then east adjacent to Ma‘ale Adumim, before reaching the Palestinian village of Hizma and then onward to Ramallah in the north.2 Route 1 is the only road that connects the otherwise bifurcated West Bank, but it means Palestinians drive deep into the E1 area, something which the new road would halt completely.

“It’s going to close down the whole center of the West Bank to Palestinians,” Hagit Ofran, codirector of Israeli advocacy group Peace Now’s Settlement Watch Team, told Jerusalem Story.3 “The whole area of Ma‘ale Adumim settlement and its surroundings, there will be no road for Palestinians to enter it.”

What this means is Palestinians will only be able to enter this area on foot.

“You cannot really establish anything,” Ofran said. “You cannot really live in a place where you don’t have access with a car. And that is the dramatic meaning of this road.”

According to Peace Now, once the road is completed, dozens of Bedouin villages in the E1 area, such as Khan al-Ahmar, Wadi al-Jamal, ‘Arab al-Saraya, and Jabal al-Baba, home to hundreds of Palestinians, will be isolated from the rest of the West Bank. Some of these Palestinian communities may even be demolished in order to build the road (see New Settler Outpost near the Jerusalem Village of Khan al-Ahmar Threatens Schoolchildren).

While the cabinet decision says the road will ease traffic congestion on Route 1, the main highway, which winds through Ma‘ale Adumim, the new road actually aims to openly solidify Israel’s system of apartheid by diverting Palestinian vehicles away from Israeli settlements and from Jerusalem. “This is not just another road,” Daniel Seidemann, founder and director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, an Israeli NGO tracking developments in Jerusalem, told Jerusalem Story.4 “This basically allows Israel to take over Area C [of the West Bank] to the east of Jerusalem without Palestinians. The area will be accessible to the occupier, because their part of the road is not sealed, and will be inaccessible to the occupied.”

Adding insult to injury, funding for the road comes straight out of Palestinian pockets via the off-budget fund of the Civil Administration, the Israeli military body tasked with administering Area C of the West Bank, including Palestinians and Jewish settlers. The fund is made up of tax revenues collected from Palestinian residents.5

“The government’s cynicism knows no bounds,” Peace Now wrote in its press release on the road. “It seeks to construct the road using funds extracted from the fruits of Israeli control over the occupied territories—funds that, by law, are designated for the benefit of the Palestinian population.”6

Officially titled Route 4370, the highway was the brainchild of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. In 2005, Sharon responded to former US president George W. Bush’s rejection of Israel’s E1 settlement plan by building Route 4370 to demonstrate that Palestinians can have what he termed “transportational contiguity.” This is because US opposition to the E1 settlement plan revolved around Palestinians losing their territorial contiguity necessary for statehood.7

Promoted since the 1990s, the E1 plan proposes to turn this part of the West Bank into a bustling commercial and industrial hub, and to fulfill Israel’s vision of a Greater Jerusalem (see Israel’s Vision of a Greater [Jewish] Jerusalem), which seeks to connect the three rings of Israeli settlements in and around Jerusalem (see The Three Israeli Settlement Rings in and around East Jerusalem: Supplanting Palestinian Jerusalem). By splitting the West Bank in half and cutting off Palestinian access to East Jerusalem, the E1 settlement bloc will stunt the growth of Palestinian communities in the heart of the West Bank while also eliminating the possibility of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. E1 also sparked international outcry as its construction would demolish Bedouin villages in the area, like Khan al-Ahmar. At the time, critics argued that completion of Route 4370 would pave the way for E1’s execution.

Construction of Route 4370 was halted in 2007, as the US and wider international community were not convinced by Sharon’s “transportational contiguity” argument. At the time, Peace Now responded,

With only the northern section of the road completed, the highway didn’t actually open until 2019.9 In 2020, plans to finish the road were back on the table when former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett approved the plan while serving as Israel’s defense minister.10

At the time, commenting on the planned route for 4370, Peace Now noted, “The only roads Israel paved for Palestinians in its 52 years of control over the Territories were designed to allow Israel to build settlements or barriers that block existing Palestinian routes. There is no desire here to improve Palestinian transport, only to expand the settlements.”11

Indeed, Seidemann explained to Jerusalem Story that the plan was resurrected because of settler demands to erase Palestinians from their commute.

“Why did the settlers want it? Because it cuts them off [from the Palestinians] . . . It’s a further integration of the West Bank into Israel proper by linking it to the national road grid,” Seidemann said. “Traffic could go from the settlements in Kokhav Ya’akov to Gush Etzion [a cluster of Israeli settlements south of Jerusalem and Bethlehem] and back without a traffic light.”

Yet Bennett’s revival of the project was about more than just a Palestinian-free highway.

“Bennett . . . technically said the quiet part out loud,” Seidemann said. “He called it the Sovereignty Road. This is about exerting de facto sovereignty over the West Bank incrementally.”

And once the road is in place, the main past objections to completing the large loop that the Separation Wall is supposed to make all around the E1 area will be moot, since Palestinians will ostensibly have an alternate driving route, so the completion of the barrier all in that area can proceed (see map).

In a chest-thumping manner, Israel is moving the Route 4370 plan forward in defiance of past US pressure.

“One of the big lines [Israel is] pushing . . . is ‘we dictate policy, not the Americans,’” Diana Buttu, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization, told Jerusalem Story.12 “So there’s always been this debate of ‘Who’s in charge? Is it us or is it the Americans?’”

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clings to power amid declining domestic popularity, the Israeli leader is more swayed by the desires of his coalition and political party than international criticism, Seidemann explains.