Palestinians are forced to use longer secondary roads while enabling Israelites to travel freely between settlements.

On Aug. 15, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) accused Israel of using a settlement road network to reshape the geography of the West Bank, which it said aims to isolate Palestinian communities and turning them into fragmented enclaves.

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In a report, the National Bureau for Defending the Land and Resisting Settlements (NBPRS) said Israeli authorities have allocated substantial budgets to build hundreds of kilometers of bypass, security and secondary roads serving settlers.

These projects have led to the annexation of large areas of West Bank land and the seizure of additional land along the roads to establish what Israelis described as “security buffer zones.”

The NBPRS accused the network of being part of a policy of separating and fragmenting Palestinian communities by creating geographical barriers that hinder the expansion of Palestinian towns and villages.

Settlement roads encircle Palestinian communities, forcing residents to use longer secondary roads while enabling settlers to travel quickly and freely between settlements and Israeli cities, it added.

The Palestinian report followed an Israeli government decision to allocate about US$334 million for road construction connecting new settlements in the West Bank.

Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 and has since established settlements there. The settlements are regarded as illegal under international law and are a key obstacle to peace talks, which have been frozen since 2014. By the end of 2025, there were 645 Israeli occupation sites and military bases in the West Bank, including 151 settlements and 350 outposts.

Separately, PLO official Qassem Awad, deputy head of the human rights department, told the official Voice of Palestine radio that the organization is preparing to file a request to the International Criminal Court to add names of what he described as “new war criminals” and seek arrest warrants against them.

Referring to Friday’s Israeli airstrike on a funeral procession in Gaza’s Nuseirat camp that killed eight Palestinians, Awad called it “a full-fledged war crime.” He said the PLO would continue efforts to document such violations and intensify legal action aimed at promoting international accountability.

teleSUR/ JF

Source: Xinhua

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