Report: Israel Intensifies 'Elimination' of Palestinian Life in West Bank

A new report from the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem claims that Israel is systematically working to "eliminate" the conditions necessary for Palestinian collective life in the occupied West Bank. Shared ahead of its official publication, the "Elimination Project" describes a dramatic intensification of attacks on virtually every aspect of Palestinian existence since October 2023.

According to B'Tselem, these actions target the ability of Palestinians to carry out routine daily activities, such as getting to work, taking children to school, receiving medical care, or cultivating land. The report identifies five "interwoven domains of action" guiding this assault: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.

This comprehensive report, B'Tselem's most extensive work on the West Bank since its establishment in 1989, comes shortly after British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband accused settler "terrorists," backed by Benjamin Netanyahu's government, of committing ethnic cleansing in the region. However, B'Tselem's findings go further, examining the broader conditions for Palestinian collective survival.

The report suggests that various arms of the Israeli state, notably led by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, aim to

create a reality in which millions of Palestinians live in constant fear of Israeli military and civilian violence.

The report asserts that Palestinian communities are being pushed out in an accelerating process of ethnic cleansing, replaced by an expanding Israeli presence in the form of settlements, outposts, and infrastructure for Jewish residents only. The term "elimination" in this context refers to "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's described as an ongoing political project to re-organize space, making Jewish presence contiguous and permanent while fragmenting and making Palestinian existence vulnerable and dependent.

One stark illustration of this fragmentation is the arbitrary closure of roads and villages. Haytham Adnan Murad, 49, recounted an incident near his village of Sair. Returning from a hospital appointment in Hebron with his 12-year-old daughter Balqis, who recently had surgery and cannot walk, he found a road gate previously open in the morning had been closed by the Israeli army.

This forced him to carry his daughter around the roadblock.

When we left, the gate was open. Now it's closed, but this is daily life,

Murad stated.

"In the morning, things are different from the afternoon.

There's no dignity in this."

While the report links the acceleration of these actions to the period following the Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, it emphasizes that the underlying ideology predates this event. Authors point to documents like Smotrich's "Decisive Plan" from 2017 as evidence of this long-standing agenda.

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