A new report published Monday by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem argues that the scattered acts of violence and suppression experienced by Palestinians across the occupied West Bank are not isolated incidents but part of a single, coordinated project: making Palestinian life on the land unsustainable and replacing it with permanent Israeli control. Titled 'The Elimination Project,' the report draws on nearly 2,000 Palestinian testimonies to describe what it calls 'a comprehensive mechanism of elimination.'

By 'elimination,' B'Tselem refers to the systematic dismantling of Palestinian society—eroding its institutions, economy, freedom of movement, and social life. The report places this within what it calls 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: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.

B'Tselem traces this logic to the 2017 'Decisive Plan' authored by Bezalel Smotrich, now Israel's finance minister. The plan, the group says, 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 argues; 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 war in Gaza 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. The restrictions feed a wider collapse: unemployment at the end of last year had roughly doubled to 27.5 percent compared to October 2023, driven in part by the freezing of work permits for about 115,000 Palestinians.

The squeeze is deliberate, the report argues: a family that cannot earn is easier to uproot, and when Palestinians fall back on their own land, the pressure follows them there. Agricultural and grazing outposts have 'violently taken control' of nearly 20 percent of the West Bank, according to Israeli settlement-watchdog group Peace Now. More than 1,600 settler attacks were recorded by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) last year. The same pressure extends to where Palestinians can build; Israeli authorities make it 'virtually impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits,' according to OCHA, leaving many families who build without them under constant threat of demolition. As Palestinian communities are cleared, more illegal Israeli settlements expand. The current government has approved a record 104 new settlements since 2022.

The suppression also extends to the institutions that hold Palestinian society together, with B'Tselem documenting a series of raids and closure orders faced by charities, trade unions and universities. Running beneath all of it is the military's lethal force. B'Tselem counted about 1,087 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since October 2023, roughly a quarter of them children. Among them was Jamil Hanani, a 17-year-old boy from Beit Furik who was shot during an army raid on the town. 'It's as if they go out hunting, only they're hunting human beings,' his father, 'Atef Hanani, told B'Tselem.

For years, foreign governments have urged Israel to show restraint. That framing misses the point, B'Tselem argued: the violence, closures and demolitions are not failures of the system, but the system working as intended. Sanctioning an individual settler, reopening a road or freezing a single settlement plan would 'leave intact the structure that produces violence, dispossession, and oppression,' it said. Seen this way, the question is not whether each individual act is an isolated violation, but what they produce together: a steadily shrinking space for Palestinians to live, work, build and remain on their land. And the West Bank, the report argued, cannot be read apart from Gaza. The two are 'different manifestations of the same regime project, directed against Palestinians' ability to exist as a people.'

Source: www.aljazeera.com