Israel working to eliminate Palestinian presence from West Bank, NGO warns

B’Tselem’s new report, titled the “Elimination Project,” argues that Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank are not a series of disconnected actions but part of a single, coordinated political project intended to erode Palestinian collective life and establish permanent Jewish-Israeli sovereignty. The findings draw on roughly 2,000 testimonies from Palestinians and outline five interconnected mechanisms the group says Israel employs to achieve that aim. The report’s first mechanism highlights the use of military operations and armed settler violence to create fear, coerce communities and compel displacement. B’Tselem says the Israeli army has carried out operations and demolitions while assisting armed settlers; between October 2023 and September 2026 it records at least 1,107 Palestinian deaths in the West Bank. The group estimates at least 75 Palestinian communities have been forcibly displaced and that settlers have taken control of more than 1,070,000 dunams of land—about 18 percent of the West Bank as of July 2026—and that roughly 33,000 Palestinians were displaced from refugee camps in the northern West Bank. A second set of measures documented by the report centers on restrictions of movement and economic pressures. B’Tselem cites United Nations OCHA figures showing 925 movement obstacles, including roadblocks and unmanned checkpoints, across the territory by the end of last year. The NGO says these and other policies have contributed to a sharp economic decline: unemployment rose from 13.1 percent in 2022 to over 31 percent in 2024, which the report characterises as part of a deliberate campaign to stifle Palestinian livelihoods. The final mechanism described is the criminalisation of political organising and dissent. According to the report, Israeli authorities have suppressed protests and detained activists, students and journalists; since the start of the October 2023 conflict in Gaza, B’Tselem records at least 60 arrests of Palestinian journalists in the West Bank. The organisation calls on the international community to stop treating these actions as isolated incidents, to end what it describes as complicity, and to use available measures under international law to protect Palestinians and dismantle what it terms Israel’s military rule and apartheid system. B’Tselem executive director Yuli Novak urged global actors to take immediate steps to halt violence and the processes that are “tearing Palestinian life apart.”