Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – On any given week, Palestinians across the occupied West Bank can experience dozens of what appear to be isolated acts of Israeli violence and suppression. In early September, Israeli forces killed two teenagers during a military raid in al-Mughayyir, east of Ramallah. Days later in Masafer Yatta, Israeli forces demolished every home in Khirbet al-Tabban, leaving about 70 people, including 30 children, without shelter.
In Qusra, south of Nablus, settlers have kept three families under siege inside their homes for more than a month, cutting off their water and power. In a new report published on Monday, Israeli rights group B’Tselem argued these are not separate incidents. Together, they work towards a single end: Making Palestinian life on the land unsustainable and replacing it with permanent Israeli control.
The reality in the West Bank, the group said, is “neither a temporary crisis nor a collection of random human rights violations”. Instead, it is “an accelerated and explicit phase in an ongoing project of elimination that operates within the Israeli apartheid regime and is driven by a settler-colonial logic of dispossession, displacement, and the establishment of Jewish-Israeli sovereignty”, the publication – called The Elimination Project – added. Drawing on nearly 2,000 Palestinian testimonies, the report said that seemingly separate Israeli violations are part of what it called “a comprehensive mechanism of elimination”.
By “elimination”, B’Tselem referred to the systematic dismantling of Palestinian society, eroding its institutions, economy, freedom of movement and social life. The report placed this within what it called the “basic logic of settler colonialism”: Establishing “permanent settler sovereignty over a territory already inhabited by an Indigenous people” by “pushing them out, dispossessing them and dismantling their collective existence”. It identifies five interconnected fronts through which that process operates: Violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.
B’Tselem traced that logic to the 2017 “Decisive Plan” authored by Bezalel Smotrich, now Israel’s finance minister. The plan, the group said, gave Palestinians three choices: Accept Jewish supremacy while giving up their national claims, leave, or face violent suppression. None of this is new, the report argued; the mechanism has run for decades.
What has changed is that it has grown far more severe and open, escalating since the current far-right government took office in late 2022 and sharply after the start of the genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in October 2023. For roughly 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, that system is felt in the steady narrowing of daily life: Roads they cannot use, land they cannot reach, and fewer places where they can safely live, work and move. By December 2025, Israel had at least 925 physical obstacles set up across the West Bank, the most the United Nations has recorded in two decades.
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