The blockade, the wall, and other movement restrictions are necessary for Israeli security.

The fact that this claim is tolerated says much about the dehumanization of Palestinians. Movement restrictions are a daily reality that humiliates millions of Palestinians. In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians have been confined in an open-air prison for two decades, unable to leave, even for life-saving medical treatment. In the West Bank, three million endure checkpoints, arbitrary closures, and permit regimes that separate families, obstruct education and healthcare, and expose them to arrest, violence, or death simply for moving. These policies do not merely restrict movement. They strip Palestinians of their dignity, freedom, and basic rights.

International law does not permit an occupying power to invoke "security" as a blanket justification for restricting an occupied population. In its 2004 Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice held that Israel's wall and its associated regime "cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order."

The blockade of Gaza is not a targeted security measure but a system of collective punishment. Since 2007, Israel has confined more than 2.2 million Palestinians under a land, air, and sea blockade, isolating Gaza from the rest of Palestine and the world. It controls Gaza's borders, restricting the movement of people seeking healthcare and education, while controlling the entry of food, fuel, electricity, medicine, and humanitarian aid. Since October 2023, Israel has escalated the blockade into a policy of deliberate starvation. Collective punishment and starvation of civilians as a method of warfare are war crimes.

Around 85% of Israel's apartheid wall lies inside the occupied West Bank, while more than 920 checkpoints, roadblocks, gates, trenches, and other obstacles separate Palestinians from their homes, farmland, schools, hospitals, and workplaces, facilitating the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements. In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall and its associated regime are contrary to international law and called on Israel to dismantle them. In 2024, it ruled that Israel's occupation as a whole is unlawful and must end. Israel has ignored both rulings, continuing to expand movement restrictions while entrenching its broader occupation.

Who threatens whom has a clear answer. Israel is the colonial occupying power. It controls Palestinian land, borders, airspace, and movement while bombing, besieging, raiding, imprisoning, torturing, and killing them. Portraying the occupied population as the security threat obscures the reality of colonial domination.

Racialized restrictions on movement are a hallmark of apartheid. Like apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow in the United States, Israel restricts freedom of movement based on ethnicity. Israeli Jews move freely across occupied Palestine, while Palestinians are confined through blockades, sieges, checkpoints, permits, road closures, and the apartheid wall. This is apartheid, not security.

Israel's movement restrictions serve two central objectives of its settler-colonial project: fragmentation and displacement. Through the blockade of Gaza, the division of the West Bank into isolated enclaves, residency revocations, restrictions on family reunification, and the denial of refugees' right of return, Israel fragments the Palestinian people geographically, socially, economically, and politically, undermining the national unity necessary to resist colonial domination. At the same time, these policies create a coercive environment that facilitates forcible displacement and demographic engineering.