West Bank | Elimination plan for the occupied territories

Guarded by Israeli soldiers, bulldozers tear down the home of the Palestinian Al-Atrash family in the village of Qilqes, south of the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Hebron; Apparently the building permit was missing. Photo: AFP/Hazem Bader The name leaves no room for misunderstanding: "The Elimination Project", roughly translated as "elimination plan", is the name of the latest report by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem. Since the end of 2022, when the current right-wing extremist government coalition was formed and further intensified from October 2023, "Israel has drastically intensified its attack on all areas of life of Palestinians in the West Bank," it says. Everyday human activities are subject to constant Israeli attacks or are denied altogether: driving to work, taking children to school, going to university, going to the doctor, meeting with family and friends, cultivating one's land, going on vacation or attending cultural events.

To do this, the Palestinians in the areas occupied by Israel would have to constantly fear for their lives and their physical integrity: "Palestinians can be subjected to violence by soldiers or armed settler militias at any time, arrested and imprisoned, mistreated and humiliated and sometimes even killed." B'Tselem speaks of an attack "both against the individual and against the collective of Palestinians" and 3.5 million people are "in a constant struggle against the oppression and expropriation imposed by the Israeli regime”.

»What the Palestinians in the West Bank are experiencing is not a series of separate incidents. It is a single political project that reaches into every part of life," said B'Tselem Executive Director Yuli, according to the Arabic TV news channel "Al-Jazeera."

According to the report, the overall goal is to eliminate collective Palestinian life and establish permanent Jewish-Israeli sovereignty in the occupied West Bank. To implement this, the Israeli state uses five interrelated mechanisms: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, as well as ethnic cleansing and territorial seizure.

This includes the use of the military and “armed settler militias to enforce violence, fear and coercion,” according to the report. Between October 2023 and September 2026, the Israeli army killed at least 1,107 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, B'Tselem said. To date, at least 75 Palestinian communities have been forcibly displaced. Israel has control of around 18 percent of the West Bank through armed settlers (as of July 2026).

Israel is also actively restricting the movement of Palestinians: the United Nations documented 925 obstacles to movement, including roadblocks and unmanned checkpoints, by the end of last year. Economic life in the West Bank is also being massively hindered, so that unemployment has grown from 13.1 percent in 2022 to more than 31 percent in 2024. Since 1967, Israel has been hindering the independent economic development of the Palestinians, directing Palestinian workers to the Israeli labor market, controlling resources and border crossings and preventing the independent expansion of infrastructure, industry and trade.

Finally, Israeli authorities criminalized political organization, suppressed protests, and arrested activists, students, and journalists.

According to B'Tselem, the report is based on decades of documented Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights in the West Bank as well as analysis of Israeli policies. "In addition, around 2,000 testimonies from Palestinians living in the West Bank collected in recent years as well as evaluations of official documents, laws, government resolutions and other reports are included."

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