Israel’s Ministry of Defense announced on Monday the commencement of construction on a fortified barrier along the Jordanian border, stretching nearly 500 kilometers from the southern edge of the occupied Golan Heights to north of Eilat.
The project, priced at 5.5 billion shekels (over $1.7 billion), marks a significant step toward Israel’s long-telegraphed plan to encircle, fragment, and annex the occupied West Bank.
The decision came just one day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a leading proponent of settlement expansion, reaffirmed that Israel would retain what he described as “sovereign power of security” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
That declaration followed a July vote in the Israeli Knesset backing legislation to impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, declaring it and the Jordan Valley as “an inseparable part of the historical homeland of the Jewish people”—a statement widely rejected under international law and viewed as settler-colonial rhetoric.
On Dec. 3, 2025, the Israeli daily Haaretz revealed that the military is advancing a new separation fence deep inside the Jordan Valley, fencing off over 11,000 acres of Palestinian land. The plan includes the demolition of homes, animal shelters, and vital infrastructure, with at least one village expected to be entirely encircled—an expansion of the apartheid apparatus.
The barrier, currently being erected at least 12 kilometers west of the Jordanian border, will sever Palestinian agricultural and pastoral communities from their land and from one another—mirroring the apartheid wall in the western West Bank, condemned by the International Court of Justice in 2004.
Despite spanning 335 kilometers—97 of which abut the West Bank—the Jordanian border has remained largely quiet. Yet since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, a Palestinian-led resistance offensive on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli military planners have treated the frontier as a potential new front, stoking alarmist narratives of infiltration.
Security references to sporadic past resistance operations—such as the 1990 raid by Sultan Al-Ajlouni, the 1997 shooting by Ahmad Daqamseh, and the 2007 bombing by Muhammad Al-Saksk—have been revived in Israeli media to justify militarization, despite the relative calm that has defined the border.
The most recent incident occurred in September 2024, when Maher Al-Jazi shot and killed three Israeli occupation soldiers at the King Hussein Bridge.
A leaked document from August, signed by Central Command head Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, outlined the wall’s role in a broader military project known as “Hot Hashani” or “Crimson Thread,” underscoring its entrenchment in Israeli military doctrine.
Beyond its tactical framing, the wall reflects Israel’s decades-old adoption of the Allon Plan—a blueprint for annexing the Jordan Valley through military zones, settlement expansion, and demographic engineering. Entire Palestinian communities have been barred from building, denied access to water and electricity, and forced into immobility through permit systems designed to erode their presence.
In the early 2000s, further restrictions blocked unregistered Palestinians from entering the valley altogether, deepening spatial apartheid.
Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the new construction and settlement expansion as a blatant violation of international law, branding it an assault on the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The ministry cited the ICJ’s advisory opinion, which affirmed the illegality of the occupation and the nullity of settlement construction and land annexation.
The wall’s announcement coincides with Israel’s intensifying military assault on the northern West Bank, code-named “Operation Five Stones.” The offensive targets five areas in Tubas governorate, including Tubas city, Tayasir village, Aqaba, Tammun, and the Al-Far’a refugee camp. It comes amid a surge in calls from Israeli ministers to accelerate de jure annexation.
In late November, the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee passed a bill to allow illegal settlers to directly purchase land in the occupied West Bank—a legal maneuver to formalize land theft.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a vocal advocate for Israel's apartheid policies, reiterated in November his intention to impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. “2025 will be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” he declared, invoking biblical nomenclature to mask a program of dispossession.
In February, Republican lawmakers in the US House of Representatives introduced bills to ban the use of the term “West Bank” in US government documents, replacing it with “Judea and Samaria”—a symbolic alignment with Israel’s annexation agenda, further entrenching US complicity.
