When two Palestinian gunmen approached Jerusalem’s Ramot junction and opened fire on people and buses on Monday morning, killing six people and wounding several more, they became the latest in a long series of terrorists who have managed to exploit weaknesses in Israel’s West Bank security barrier to deadly effect.

The pair, who set out from West Bank towns just a few kilometers away, got to the busy intersection in northern Jerusalem armed with a Carlo rifle and a pistol, weapons they would have likely been unable to smuggle in had they entered Jerusalem via an army checkpoint.

Instead, investigators believe they climbed over the barrier near the Palestinian city of al-Ram, then were picked up by a resident of East Jerusalem who dropped them off near site of the attack. The alleged driver was arrested on the day of the attack.

When it was built some 20 years ago, the security barrier was credited as a major component in stemming the tide of terror attacks emanating from the West Bank that plagued Israel throughout the Second Intifada.

But over the years, terrorists have repeatedly found ways to breach the barrier at its weak points and enter Israel, along with many other Palestinians who have gone through, over or around the fence to enter Israel for work.

In 2022, Israeli officials vowed to patch holes and upgrade the barrier after a series of deadly terror attacks by West Bank Palestinians within weeks of each other forced the issue to the top of the political agenda.

In late March that year, a Palestinian who crossed through the barrier illegally — with a vehicle — shot and killed five people in Bnei Brak. A week later three people were killed in Tel Aviv by a Palestinian who crossed the barrier illegally, and on Independence Day in May, three people in Elad were axed to death by a Palestinian who also entered Israel illegally.

Israel began constructing the security barrier in 2002 at the height of the Second Intifada, when suicide bombings and shootings were claiming lives almost daily, at a cost of NIS 9 billion ($2.8 billion at today’s exchange rate), according to the Knesset Research and Information Center. On paper, the project was meant to serve as a sort of de facto border between the West Bank and Israel aimed at keeping Palestinians from being able to easily reach Israeli cities.

In practice, however, 85 percent of the route runs inside West Bank territory rather than along the pre-1967 Green Line, snaking through some areas in order to keep settlements on the Israeli side while excluding Palestinian towns.

Israel stopped building the barrier in 2006 with over half of its planned 700-kilometer (435-mile) route yet to be completed, and it remains unfinished to this day.

Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, who works with Bimkom, an organization that has fought legal battles over the route for two decades, told The Times of Israel that the decision to wind the barrier’s route in deference to Israeli West Bank settlements weakened it as a security measure, a stance he said was backed by officers he spoke to while delivering a lecture to the IDF Command and Staff College during the latter years of the wall’s construction.

“Responsible and serious officers told me, ‘Look, we don’t argue with you – this barrier isn’t security-related. In internal discussions, we opposed the route in several places,’” Cohen-Lifshitz recalled. “It wasn’t drawn up for security considerations but for settlement ones. For example, if at the time of construction there was a settlement’s jurisdiction or a plan to build one nearby, the route was pushed dramatically farther out [from the settlement]. That made the route costlier and much harder to defend.”

The section apparently breached on Monday separates East Jerusalem from nearby Palestinian villages, severing links between Arab neighborhoods in the capital and the West Bank.

“The barrier has affected both East Jerusalem and the villages around it,” said Aviv Tatarsky of Ir Amim, a left-wing organization that advocates for East Jerusalem Palestinians. “It cut the villages off from Jerusalem. All economic activity between them was severed. People who had jobs in the city could reach them only if they had a permit, and even then it became much harder. Trade collapsed, whether the wholesaler was in the West Bank and the shop in East Jerusalem or the other way around.”

The barrier is not uniform. Most of it consists of an electronic chain-link fence flanked by patrol roads, barbed wire, and trenches, stretching about 60 meters (200 feet) wide. But in urban areas such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Qalqilya, and Tulkarem, Israel constructed concrete walls eight to nine meters (26 to 30 feet) high. There are roughly 70 kilometers of these walls, including the stretch the Jerusalem attackers crossed.

Despite its imposing presence, critics have long warned that the barrier has failed to fulfill its purpose of preventing terrorists from entering Israel.

In 2018, retired IDF Maj. Gen. Gershon Hacohen wrote in a report (Hebrew): “The barrier does not constitute an obstacle that prevents terror, and the proof is that when Palestinians decide to cross the fence — whether to work in Israel as illegal laborers or for criminal purposes — it is possible, on a significant scale.”

The fact that large sections remain unfinished has severely undermined the barrier’s effectiveness. Palestinians know where the gaps are and exploit them.

Even in places where the fence is complete, crossings occur. People climb ladders, crawl through drainage passages, or use other improvised methods.

“Fence crossings do not occur only in areas without a barrier,” Hacohen observed. “They also happen where a fence exists. The IDF does not have the capacity to deploy forces and equipment on the scale needed to prevent this.”

After the string of attacks in 2022, the army launched Operation Break the Wave, completing several additional kilometers of fencing in the northern and southern West Bank and reinforcing the presence of troops along the route.

The Israel Defense Forces’ Judea and Samaria Division was bulked up from 13 battalions to 24, the commander said at the time. Training exercises were suspended to free up manpower.

Critics charged that until then, the army had turned a blind eye to illegal crossings, allowing Palestinians to enter Israel for work in order to ease economic pressure in the West Bank.

The military buildup largely halted those crossings. About six months after the launch of the operation, a senior security official told the Walla news site that the policy had led to a dramatic decrease in the number of Palestinians crossing into Israel. “If a year ago, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians crossed the seam line each week without obstruction – including those who had permits but crossed illegally out of convenience – today only hundreds are crossing.”

Assaf Adiv, who heads the Ma’an workers’ association, which assists Palestinian laborers, said Israel compensated by easing the process for Palestinians to obtain work permits to enter the country legally. The minimum age for unmarried men was lowered from 35 to 27, and in some cases even younger men in their early twenties were approved if their fathers already held permits, for instance.

“There was a dramatic increase in the number of permits granted to Palestinians,” he told The Times of Israel. “At the same time, there was much stricter enforcement along the separation barrier to prevent infiltrations.”

Following that success, the army reduced its deployment along the barrier. The IDF did not provide The Times of Israel with updated figures on the current troop levels near the fence.

Everything changed after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Israel barred more than 100,000 Palestinians from working either inside Israel or for Israeli employers in the West Bank. That decision reignited pressure to enter Israel illegally, though Palestinians no longer risk regular crossings back and forth, instead remaining inside Israel illegally, according to official figures.

The IDF estimated that before Operation Break the Wave, some 40,000 Palestinians crossed into Israel without permits each week, according to an IDF estimate. Today, the army says weekly crossings have fallen to the hundreds or low thousands, though between 45,000 and 70,000 Palestinians now reside in Israel illegally on a long-term basis.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics offers dramatically lower figures, reporting just 14,000 Palestinians working in Israel without permits in the second quarter of 2025.

Before October 7, Israel issued about 140,000 permits for Palestinians – both for work inside the Green Line and in Israeli settlements or industrial zones in the West Bank.

Today, 18,000 permits are granted for work in the West Bank, and only 8,600 permits remain valid for work inside Israel, according to the Defense Ministry unit that coordinates with Palestinians on civil affairs. Work inside the Green Line is limited to so-called essential sectors such as hospitality and caregiving, with the construction industry, which previously employed around 90% of Palestinians in Israel, excluded. In practice, demand for Palestinian labor in the permitted fields is low, meaning just 6,200 Palestinians actually enter Israel legally each day, the ministry said.

The steep reduction in permits, which was never formally explained by the government, is believed to be predicated on security concerns after thousands of Palestinians streaming across the Gaza border carried out massacres in Israeli communities on October 7.

The restrictions have led those who used to work in Israel with permits to begin entering illegally to make a living.

“In the past, those who crossed illegally were either very young or people flagged as security risks by Israel who had no chance of receiving permits,” Adiv said. “Today, the ones I hear about crossing are older people, those who worked in Israel for many years, and simply can’t survive anymore economically. Everyone is crossing.”

The shift has fueled a parallel industry of profiteers, like drivers to shuttle Palestinians from breach points to workplaces inside Israel.

In the case of the recent Jerusalem attack, police said the East Jerusalem man arrested as the terrorists’ driver was already known to have transported Palestinian laborers.

Police, responsible for apprehending those inside the country illegally, have stepped up enforcement. In March, police said they had arrested 4,153 Palestinians working illegally in Israel since the start of 2025.

“The number of arrests is huge, but it doesn’t compare to the number of people entering,” Adiv said.

He noted that the pace of arrests had remained steady since October 2023. “I looked at police data – about 30,000 Palestinian workers have been arrested since the start of the war, around 1,500 a month, 50 a day. That’s a lot. But the number of workers entering is four times that. The police can’t, and won’t, stop the flood,” he said.

Police did not respond to a request to confirm the figures.

Tatarsky of Ir Amim said from a security perspective, Israel would be better off issuing more permits.

“Then the only ones crossing would be those without permits, and the police could deal with that much more easily,” he said. “But that’s not what they want – the security story is nonsense. From my perspective, this attack is a result of the denial of permits. Not because someone was poor and angry, but because now the police can’t catch those who are truly dangerous.”