Israel is working towards the systematic “elimination” of the conditions that sustain Palestinian collective life in the occupied West Bank, according to a major report published by the human rights group B’Tselem. The Israeli organisation’s hard-hitting report, shared with the Guardian in advance of publication, says Israel is “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”. According to B’Tselem, the assault on Palestinians is “governed by a coherent organising logic” and comprises five “interwoven domains of action”: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.
The publication of the Elimination Project, B’Tselem’s most comprehensive piece of work on the West Bank since its launch in 1989, comes less than a week after the British foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, accused settler terrorists, supported by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, of committing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, in the UK’s starkest condemnation of Israel since the foundation of the state. 1,107Number of Palestinians killed by Israel in the West Bank since October 2023 By looking more broadly at the conditions required for Palestinians’ collective existence, however, the B’Tselem report goes further still. It says various arms of the Israeli state – led by Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister with broad powers over civilian matters in the West Bank – are seeking to “create a reality in which millions of Palestinians live in constant fear of Israeli military and civilian violence”. On a recent afternoon outside the village of Sair, Haytham Adnan Murad, 49, was returning from a hospital appointment in Hebron with his 12-year-old daughter, Balqis, who is unable to walk because of recent surgery.
A gate to the road accessing his village, open in the morning, had been closed by the Israeli army, forcing Murad to get out of the taxi he was travelling in with his daughter and carry her around the roadblock. Now it’s closed, but this is daily life,” he said. There’s no dignity in this.” The authors of the report link the acceleration of the Israeli assault on life in the West Bank to the period after the Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities on 7 October 2023.
However, they argue that the underlying motivating ideology predates this period. In particular they point to a document known as the Decisive Plan, published by Smotrich in 2017, before he became a minister, which they describe as the “key document for understanding Israeli action in the West Bank.” 64 Number of entire communities forcibly displaced in the West Bank since October 2023 B’Tselem says the plan gave Palestinians three options: “Live under Jewish supremacy while relinquishing their national claims, leave the territory, or face violent suppression by the Israeli military if they resist”. It has been translated, the report adds, “into policy, budgets, powers and practices exercised by different arms of the state” with “unprecedented speed and openness”.
As such, the report goes on, settler violence is no longer “operating only as private violence or a breach of public order” but as part of a “broader system of control”. Smotrich said in September 2025 he would employ every means possible “to prevent the danger of a Palestinian state, including bringing about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority … through economic strangulation”. Mass work permit revocations have left workers and their families without a stable income.
This is reflected in data from the West Bank cited in the report. The unemployment rate, for instance, rose from 13.1% in 2022 to 31.3% in 2024, and in 2025, nearly half of all young people were neither employed nor enrolled in education or vocational training.
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