Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has accused Israel of systematically undermining the conditions that allow Palestinians to maintain collective life in the occupied West Bank.
The organisation made the allegations in its latest report, titled the Elimination Project, which it described as its most extensive examination of conditions in the West Bank since it was founded in 1989.
According to the report, Israeli authorities have intensified restrictions and actions affecting almost every part of Palestinian daily life, including access to employment, education, healthcare, public services, family and social activities, agriculture and travel.
B’Tselem said the measures were not isolated incidents but part of what it described as a coordinated system operating across five areas: violence and intimidation, restrictions on movement, economic pressure, destruction of social and political structures, and what it termed ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion.
The report said Israel was “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank”, including “the ability to get to work, take children to school or university, receive medical treatment or municipal services, meet family and friends, cultivate land or go on vacation … routine activities that make up human life”.
B’Tselem argued that the broader objective was to make Palestinian communities increasingly vulnerable while expanding permanent Israeli settlements and infrastructure across the territory.
“Palestinian communities are being pushed out in an accelerating process of ethnic cleansing, while an ever-expanding Israeli presence is being established in their place in the form of settlements, outposts, farms and Jewish-only civilian infrastructure,” the report said.
“Elimination in this context means sustained harm to the conditions that enable Palestinians to exist as a people with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history, and a social and political horizon.
“It is an ongoing political project that seeks to re-organise space and the conditions of life so that Jewish presence becomes contiguous, institutionalised and permanent, while Palestinian existence becomes fragmented, vulnerable and dependent.”
B’Tselem said 1,107 Palestinians had been killed by Israel in the West Bank since October 2023, while 64 entire communities had been forcibly displaced during the same period.
The impact of movement restrictions was highlighted through the experience of Haytham Adnan Murad, 49, from the village of Sair.
Murad was returning from a hospital appointment in Hebron with his 12-year-old daughter, Balqis, who was unable to walk following recent surgery. A gate providing access to the village had been open earlier in the day but was later closed by Israeli soldiers, forcing Murad to leave his taxi and carry his daughter around the roadblock.
“When we left, the gate was open. Now it’s closed, but this is daily life,” he said. “In the morning, things are different from the afternoon. There’s no dignity in this.”
The report linked the escalation in restrictions and violence to the period following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israeli communities. However, B’Tselem said the ideology behind the policies existed before the attack.
It identified a 2017 document known as the Decisive Plan, authored by Bezalel Smotrich before he became Israel’s finance minister, as a key document for understanding developments in the West Bank.
B’Tselem said the plan offered Palestinians three choices: “Live under Jewish supremacy while relinquishing their national claims, leave the territory, or face violent suppression by the Israeli military if they resist”.
The organisation said the ideas had subsequently been translated “into policy, budgets, powers and practices exercised by different arms of the state” with “unprecedented speed and openness”.
It also argued that settler violence had increasingly become part of a wider system rather than simply individual acts.
“It is sometimes carried out alongside soldiers, with the backing of security forces, using weapons, equipment and infrastructure supplied by the state, and with almost complete impunity,” the report said.
B’Tselem also highlighted the economic consequences of Israeli policies, saying Palestinians had faced what it described as a policy of “full economic strangulation” since 2023.
The organisation said restrictions had affected employment, damaged civilian and agricultural infrastructure, increased control over resources and banking, and weakened Palestinian institutions’ ability to provide basic services.
West Bank unemployment rose from 13.1 per cent in 2022 to 31.3 per cent in 2024, according to figures cited in the report. It added that almost half of young people in the territory were neither working nor enrolled in education or vocational training in 2025.
The report also said the United Nations estimated that 700,000 Palestinians in the West Bank required assistance to purchase food in 2024, a 17 per cent increase from the previous year.
Education and Palestinian civil society have also been affected, B’Tselem said. Between eight and 20 per cent of schools were reportedly closed during the 2023-24 academic year, while community organisations and groups supporting workers, children and vulnerable people faced raids, closures, arrests and other restrictions.
Kareem Jubran, who heads B’Tselem’s field research on the West Bank, said the organisation believed the various developments were connected.
“What we uncovered is that these are not separate incidents. All the disparate elements have one character, one goal. When you look at the picture from above, it leads to one conclusion: that the main goal is to eliminate Palestinians as a collective,” he said.
B’Tselem executive director Yuli Novak said the organisation believed the situation had entered a new phase following the formation of Israel’s right-wing government in late 2022 and the escalation after October 2023.
“What we are saying in the report is that this is ongoing. The project was there before, but now we are in a new phase,” Novak said.
“It started at the end of 2022, with the change of the government [to a right-far right coalition], and we saw another marked escalation after October 2023. What we are talking about is an attack on Palestinian life in the West Bank that changed in scale. It’s as much a quantitative element that has changed, making the West Bank more and more unlivable for many Palestinians.”
Novak described Smotrich’s 2017 plan as the “blueprint” for the policies B’Tselem says are now being implemented.
“It shows the ideological and the operational way to get to what we are calling an elimination,” he said. “And he calls it victory by settlement. To win in a very final way so that nothing [such as a Palestinian state] can happen afterwards.”
The Israeli military unit responsible for civilian affairs in the West Bank and Gaza, Cogat, was approached for comment on the report’s allegations.
