JERUSALEM — An Israeli human rights organization has published a major report accusing Israel of systematically dismantling the conditions that sustain Palestinian collective life in the occupied West Bank. B'Tselem, an Israeli group established in 1989, titled its latest work "The Elimination Project."
The report claims Israel is intensifying attacks across all facets of Palestinian existence in the West Bank, including commuting to work, attending school, accessing medical treatment and municipal services, meeting family and friends, cultivating land, and traveling.
B'Tselem states this assault operates under a coherent organizing logic across five areas: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing alongside territorial takeover.
The publication follows British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband's recent accusation that settler vigilantes, supported by Benjamin Netanyahu's government, are committing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Miliband's remarks represented the United Kingdom's starkest condemnation of Israel since the state's founding.
B'Tselem documented that 1,107 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the West Bank since October 2023.
According to the report, various arms of the Israeli state are involved in this effort, led by Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister who holds broad powers over civilian matters in the West Bank.
The report describes an accelerating process of ethnic cleansing, pushing Palestinian communities out of their homes and lands, with expanding Israeli settlements, outposts, and Jewish-only civilian infrastructure established in their place.
B'Tselem defines "elimination" as sustained harm to the conditions allowing Palestinians to exist as a people—their land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history, and their social and political horizon.
The stated aim is to make Jewish presence contiguous, institutionalized, and permanent while rendering Palestinian existence fragmented, vulnerable, and dependent. Examples include closure of roads and villages to Palestinian passage and abandonment of Palestinian homes under relentless pressure.
Corroborating reports indicate Israel has enacted a systematic policy of full economic strangulation since 2023, denying livelihood opportunities, destroying civilian and agricultural infrastructure, and tightening control over resources and the banking sector. Settler trespass, harassment, construction near homes, and systematic nighttime grazing destroying crops contribute to undermining Palestinian life.
