Middle East Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Collective Life in the West Bank September 15, 2026 Share FacebookXPinterestWhatsApp B’Tselem | September 2026 About this report Since the current Israeli government took office at the end of 2022, and even more so since October 2023, Israel has dramatically escalated its assault on all aspects of Palestinian life in the West Bank. At any moment, Palestinians may be exposed to violence by soldiers or armed settler militias, arrested and imprisoned, subjected to abuse and humiliation, and sometimes even killed. The Elimination Project draws on more than 2,000 testimonies B’Tselem collected from Palestinians since October 2023 and over three decades of documenting the Israeli apartheid regime’s human rights abuses in the West Bank. The report looks at the current reality not as a collection of isolated incidents or specific harms, but as part of a comprehensive mechanism of elimination that works to dismantle the conditions for continued Palestinian existence in the West Bank, while deepening Jewish control and supremacy in an irreversible manner. An examination of the current reality in the West Bank reveals that the project of elimination is now being implemented more openly, directly and violently than before, and increasingly relies on cooperation between official state authorities and settler militias operating in the West Bank with state backing and support. Contents 01Introduction1 section · ~8 min 02Methodology1 section · ~5 min 03The Elimination Project: Political Framework7 sections · ~60 min 04The Mechanism of Elimination in the West Bank 05Legal Implications of the Elimination Project in the West Bank5 sections · ~48 min06Conclusion1 section · ~9 min Chapter 01 · Introduction Section 1 of 1 Introduction At the time of this report’s publication, a broad Israeli assault is underway in the West Bank, rapidly and systematically dismantling all the foundations of Palestinian existence. Since the formation of the current government at the end of 2022, and with even greater intensity since October 2023, Israel has dramatically escalated its assault on all areas of life for Palestinians in the West Bank. The ability to get to work, take children to school, attend university, receive medical care or municipal services, meet with family and acquaintances, cultivate one’s land, go on vacation, or attend cultural events, along with hundreds of other ordinary activities that make up daily life, are all under constant Israeli attack and are sometimes denied altogether. Over and above all this looms a constant threat to life and bodily integrity. At any moment, Palestinians may be exposed to violence by soldiers or armed settler militias, arrested and imprisoned, subjected to abuse and humiliation, and sometimes even killed. As the report shows, this combined assault, which targets Palestinians both as individuals and as a collective, has turned the lives of some 3.5 million people into a constant reality of oppression and dispossession imposed by the Israeli regime. Human rights documentation, and the public discourse surrounding it, tend to focus on individual incidents of concrete harm. This report takes a broader view. It examines the reality in the West Bank as a complex system with an underlying logic, implemented through different practices by a range of Israeli actors working at the same time and in coordination with one another. Viewed this way, Israel’s actions in the West Bank are not simply a series of separate violations of individual and collective rights. Rather, they are part of a comprehensive mechanism of elimination. Here, elimination means the sustained undermining of the conditions that allow Palestinians to exist as an independent collective with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history, and a social and political horizon. Israel’s project of elimination in the West Bank is reshaping the territory and the conditions of life within it so that Israeli control and presence become continuous, institutionalized, and permanent, while Palestinian existence becomes fragmented, vulnerable, and dependent. This report shows how Israel is implementing this mechanism of elimination through five main domains: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover. These five domains operate at once and reinforce one another. Movement restrictions and economic strangulation damage livelihoods, social ties, and Palestinians’ ability to sustain institutions and engage in political life. The resulting political and social harm weakens Palestinians’ ability to defend their rights and maintain their ties to the territory and the land. Together, these processes facilitate the expansion of Israeli control over the West Bank and the displacement of Palestinians from it. Displacement tears communities apart and harms homes, agriculture, collective memory, and geographic continuity. Violence is the central means of coercion that makes the entire system possible and accelerates its operation. Read also:US war crimesThe project of elimination is not limited to dismantling Palestinian life. It also involves Israel’s ongoing, open, and explicit effort to deepen its control over the West Bank and reorganize it around continuous Israeli presence. This is not only a matter of physical territory. The Israeli regime is also increasingly claiming exclusive ownership of the historical, religious, and identity-based narratives that shape the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israeli flags fill the West Bank, while Palestinian flags are repeatedly removed from public spaces. Israeli forces provide protection for organized pogroms by settlers while violently suppressing Palestinian protests. Settlement farms and outposts serve as tools for taking control of vast areas of land, while Palestinian farmers lose access to their fields and entire communities are uprooted. Together, these practices show how the Israeli regime is organizing the territory according to its core principle: Jewish supremacy. To understand the reality now taking shape in the West Bank, it is necessary to examine the ideological roots and governing structures on which this Israeli mechanism of elimination rests. As this report shows, the Zionist-Israeli project has clear settler-colonial characteristics: it has pursued Jewish Israeli sovereignty in a territory inhabited by an Indigenous Palestinian population through displacement, expulsion, dispossession, fragmentation, and the weakening of Palestinian existence. Since its founding, the State of Israel has structured both the territory and the distribution of rights in ways that give Jews preference over Palestinians. This is the historical foundation of the apartheid regime described in this report. Defining the Zionist-Israeli project as bearing settler-colonial characteristics does not deny Jewish historical, religious, or cultural connection to this land; the longstanding presence of Jewish communities here; or the long history of persecution, displacement, and violence Jews have endured. The question is not whether there is a Jewish affiliation to the land, but how the Zionist-Israeli project has sought to establish exclusive Jewish Israeli sovereignty in a land where Palestinians lived, and still live. This history is essential to understanding the current phase of the project of elimination. This phase relies on mechanisms Israel has developed and used for decades. But since the formation of the current government at the end of 2022, and especially since October 2023, the use of those mechanisms has accelerated and intensified. In the Gaza Strip, the logic of elimination has taken its most extreme form: the genocide Israel is committing against Palestinians there. In the West Bank, it is taking a different form, through the five domains described in this report. The two arenas are not disconnected from one another. Since October 2023, Israel has pushed the boundaries of its violence in the West Bank, too. Practices that were rare there, and are associated with the war in Gaza, have become more common. These include airstrikes, broad destruction of residential areas and infrastructure, mass displacement, and significant easing of the open-fire policy. The “Decisive Plan” published in 2017 by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is key to understanding the current reality in the West Bank. The document openly lays out the logic of elimination and links settler-colonial ideology to a political program. It presents Palestinians with three options: live under Jewish supremacy and abandon their national claims, leave, or face violent repression if they resist. In recent years, central elements of the “Decisive Plan”, and of the logic underlying it, have been translated into policy, budgets, government powers and practices on the ground. The Israeli practices described in this report also have clear legal implications. While “elimination” is not a discrete legal category, and international law does not define this undertaking as a single offense, it does identify and prohibit the project’s various components. The report’s legal analysis finds that Israel is using its military occupation of the West Bank as a central tool for maintaining an apartheid regime. It further finds that the inhuman acts committed under that regime, and in order to uphold it, meet the legal definition of apartheid, which is a crime against humanity. The policies and practices described in the report also involve other serious violations of international law, including violations of the prohibitions on annexation, settlement, deportation, and forcible transfer, as well as of Palestinians’ right to self-determination. B’Tselem has been documenting Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and investigating the Israeli regime’s mechanisms of control and repression for decades. In this capacity, it has continued since October 2023 to closely monitor developments in the West Bank and document the genocide in the Gaza Strip. The present report draws on this body of knowledge, including approximately 2,000 testimonies collected in recent years from Palestinians in the West Bank; ongoing field documentation and research; the work of other organizations; and the analysis of official documents, legislation, government resolutions, and other data. It is grounded in the understanding that documenting each incident on its own, however essential that work may be, is not enough. The report connects the different violations, examines the logic that ties them together and the mechanisms that enable them, and presents an overall picture of the reality the Israeli regime is creating in the West Bank. Read also:Top Israeli and Egyptian officials secretly meet to discuss possible Rafah invasionThe report concludes that the current reality in the West Bank is neither a temporary crisis nor a collection of random human rights violations. It is an accelerated and explicit phase in an ongoing project of elimination that operates within the Israeli apartheid regime and is driven by a settler-colonial logic of dispossession, displacement, and the establishment of Jewish Israeli sovereignty. Targeted measures may mitigate harm and provide short-term protection for certain individuals, and are therefore important. However, they do not change the underlying structure that generates the violence, dispossession, and oppression. Partial reforms or a return to a more “restrained” form of control cannot transform a system based from its inception on dispossession, plunder, and oppression into one that respects human rights. The political and international implications are urgent. The international community is facing an apartheid regime that deploys mechanisms of elimination within a settler-colonial project, and is doing so in an ever-accelerating and intensifying manner. For decades, the international community has granted the Israeli regime de facto impunity. Rather than taking decisive action to stop Israel’s crimes, as international law requires, it has largely made do with calling on Israel to “return to the political process,” “use restraint,” and “avoid unilateral measures.” Political, diplomatic, military and economic support for Israel, together with the diplomatic protection it receives, provides the Israeli regime with the resources, legitimacy and freedom to continue committing crimes against Palestinians. The genocide in Gaza has not prompted the fundamental shift in international policy that the scale of the crimes requires. The same impunity also allows the violence, economic strangulation, social and political destruction and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank to continue. Protecting Palestinians’ human rights requires ending Israel’s crimes and dismantling its apartheid regime. A future of freedom, justice, equality and democracy for all who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea requires that the Palestinians’ individual and collective rights be recognized. This includes their right to determine their own future and the establishment of a political order that is not based on supremacy, dispossession and elimination. Chapter 02 · Methodology Section 1 of 1 Methodology This report examines the actions of the Israeli regime in the West Bank and its pursuit of the elimination of Palestinians as a collective, a process that has continued since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in June 1967 and intensified significantly since October 2023. Our analysis is grounded in the understanding that the violations of Palestinians’ human rights documented over decades, including by B’Tselem, are neither isolated nor sporadic events, but rather form part of an integrated system governed by a coherent logic. The report systematically documents Palestinians’ daily lives under prolonged Israeli control, recognizing that the violence employed by the Israeli regime cannot be understood solely through moments of extreme escalation, as the regime also works to gradually erode the conditions needed to sustain Palestinian life: through the cultivation of fear and persistent uncertainty about the future; the proliferation of checkpoints and movement restrictions; control over livelihoods; and other everyday measures that make life increasingly constrained and, at times, impossible. Among the questions guiding the report are: How can we understand the overarching logic of the Israeli regime that has sustained systematic violation of rights and the abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank over decades? What characterizes the Israeli regime’s actions in the West Bank since October 2023? What trends emerge, and what do they reveal about the current political moment? How do Israel’s patterns of control and violence affect the ability of Palestinians in the West Bank to sustain themselves as individuals and as a collective? These questions are explored across several dimensions: the scale and frequency of harm; the conduct of the military, police, Civil Administration, and armed settlers, and the degree of coordination among them; the impunity and institutional backing afforded to Israelis; and the cumulative effect of these practices on Palestinians’ ability to sustain social, economic, and political life in the West Bank. Read also:Theresa May’s husband’s Investment Firm made a financial killing from the bombing of SyriaThe methodology for this report combines field research with analysis of other publicly available sources, including surveys and journalistic and historical sources. B’Tselem field researchers who live in the West Bank systematically gather information on the ground among their own communities. They collect testimonies about Israeli acts of both physical and psychological violence, home demolitions, and the displacement of Palestinian communities. Whenever possible, they interview those directly affected, their relatives, and members of the community. They also investigate events and broader phenomena through structured, in-depth interviews and ongoing follow-up, while collecting quantitative data and visual documentation, including videos and photographs. The research also analyzes how the various arms of the Israeli regime operate in coordination, including both official institutions and civilian actors acting under their auspices in the West Bank. This analysis draws on field observations and on Israeli political and public discourse as reflected in the media and on social media. It also relies on Hebrew-, Arabic-, and English-language journalism, reports by civil society organizations, and B’Tselem’s internal databases. Quantitative data presented here also draw on reports by aid and development organizations, including UN agencies, and local NGOs as well as on investigations by established media outlets that adhere to journalistic ethics and rigorous fact checking. It also relies on available official documents from Palestinian institutions, which provide figures on people killed or injured and on arrests, as well as data on damage to property and infrastructure, harm to agriculture, movement restrictions, and more. The report also uses official Israeli sources, including military orders, administrative decisions, and legal documents published by government, military, and administrative bodies. By drawing on this range of sources and cross-checking them, the report situates individual cases within broader patterns of regime conduct. It examines human rights violations in several key categories: direct physical harm, including killings and severe violence; measures that constrain daily life, such as movement restrictions and economic strangulation; and policies that undermine Palestinian society, including social and political destruction, ethnic cleansing dispossession, and expulsion. Taken together, these practices form an integrated system of control, displacement, and elimination in the West Bank. The data serve both to document violations in their legal, political, and social dimensions and to illuminate the workings of the Israeli regime. Whether a testimony concerns a road closure or demolition, violence against shepherds, the arrest of a minor, or killing of workers who crossed the Separation Barrier, the report examines it not only as an account of a particular event, but also for what it reveals about the wider system of control, strangulation, displacement, and elimination. The fact that the organization’s field researchers live within the communities in which they work and maintain ongoing relationships with them is another central component of the research methodology. This approach recognizes that those who live the difficult everyday reality of the West Bank possess knowledge essential to understanding it. The researchers’ sustained familiarity with the communities enables them to understand local contexts, identify persistent patterns, and trace gradual changes on the ground over time. In this sense, the report relies both on gathering information about Palestinian communities in the West Bank and on producing knowledge through direct, ongoing engagement, which enables an understanding of the logic of the Israeli regime in the West Bank. As a human rights organization, B’Tselem conducts this research out of a deep commitment to protecting human rights generally, and the rights of Palestinians living under Israeli control in particular. This research is conducted amid military control, ongoing violence, fear, movement restrictions, and real danger to West Bank residents. Worsening conditions on the ground make it more difficult to collect information, reach the sites of incidents, document events, conduct interviews, and verify details in real time. These constraints arise directly from the reality the report describes and formed part of the conditions under which it was produced. Continue reading at: Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Collective Life in the West Bank We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a spectrum of views as possible. 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