Israeli Nonprofit Alleges ‘Comprehensive Mechanism Of Elimination’ Facing Palestinians In West Bank

An Israeli human rights group has released a hefty report laying out its argument that Israelis in both official and unofficial capacities are working together to systematically eliminate Palestinians from the West Bank in favor of illegal Israeli settlements.

In its 245-page report titled “The Elimination Project,” B’Tselem extensively documents the yearslong pattern of displacement, detention and sometimes death facing Palestinians who have long lived in the territory. The actions are often carried out by Israeli settlers and security forces alike, enabled by the Israeli army and legitimized by Israeli state officials.

The violence has skyrocketed since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, creating what B’Tselem said is an urgent need for international action. Last month, United Nations officials sounded the alarm during a Security Council meeting that an “unprecedented” level of settler violence against Palestinian communities is pushing the West Bank to a “breaking point.”

An increasing number of countries are speaking out against the growing violence in the West Bank, with major nations like the United Kingdom, Canada and France recently imposing a trade ban with Israeli settlements. After the U.K. accused “settler terrorists” of carrying out the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” Israel retaliated by closing Britain’s consulate in Jerusalem and banning a dozen British MPs from entering the country.

B’Tselem cites its decades of accumulated documentation of Israeli violations against Palestinian human rights, providing an analysis of Israeli regime policy, field research and testimonies from about 2,000 Palestinians living in the West Bank. It also cites statements made by far-right members of the Israeli government.

The group hopes its report can provide a broader view of how human rights in the West Bank have deteriorated over the years by way of a coordinated campaign, calling the territory’s reality “a complex system with an underlying logic.”

“Viewed this way, Israel’s actions in the West Bank are not simply a series of separate violations of individual and collective rights,” the report continued. “Rather, they are part of a comprehensive mechanism of elimination.”

B’Tselem defined “elimination” in this context as sustained harm to the physical, social and political conditions that enable Palestinians’ collective existence, as well as to the possibility of imagining a shared future. That harm has shown itself in land seizures, home demolitions, two-tiered government systems and checkpoints, mass arrests, killings, settler militias and the destruction of Palestinian farmland and businesses.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces rejected B’Tselem’s conclusion as “blatantly detached from reality,” telling HuffPost it condemns all nationalist violence and works to “prevent and mitigate harm to civilians.”

According to the nonprofit, Israel has a five-pronged approach to eliminating Palestinians in the West Bank: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover. B’Tselem stressed that each prong works to reinforce the others, resulting in livelihoods ruined, communities torn apart and Palestinian rights erased.

“Elimination can be carried out through direct actions to reduce Indigenous presence, including killing, expulsion and confinement to small enclaves,” the report states. “Yet it can also take the form of an ongoing mechanism that uses legal, planning, economic and geographic measures to prevent refugees from returning, dispossess people of land, fragment communities, control movement and attack social and political institutions.”

While violence toward Palestinians in the West Bank spans decades, attacks against families by both settlers and the military have seen a sharp increase since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that led to Israel’s current decimation of Gaza — a campaign B’Tselem and other human rights groups, UN experts and scholars have separately concluded amounts to genocide. Israel forcefully rejects the accusation.

B’Tselem data shows Israel killed at least 1,107 Palestinians in the West Bank between October 2023 and August of this year, with only one Israeli — settler Yinon Levi — having been indicted in that time period. Since October 2023, Israel has also forcibly displaced 64 communities, demolished nearly 2,800 structures, established at least 185 new Jewish outposts, imposed 200 new movement obstacles and taken control of hundreds of thousands of dunams of Palestinian agricultural land.

“Over the past year, especially in recent months, the attacks really intensified, until all the families realized that we couldn’t stay anymore,” Maryam Khalil, a 64-year-old mother of 10 who was displaced from her village of Hamamat al-Maleh by settler violence, testified to B’Tselem. “I cried almost every day at the thought of having to leave the place I spent my entire life in. My children saw me crying. But in the end, we felt we had no choice. We had to save our families and what was left of our source of livelihood.”

Given the data, the human rights group joined Amnesty International in describing the violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and Israel’s occupation of the territory — deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice — as settler colonialism.

“Defining the Zionist-Israeli project as settler colonialism does not deny Jewish historical, religious and cultural connections to the space, the continuous presence of a Jewish community in it, or the long history of persecution, displacement and violence against Jews,” the report by the Israeli group clarified.

“The question it poses regarding the Zionist-Israeli project is not whether a Jewish connection to the space exists,” it continued, “but concerns the ways in which the Zionist project sought to establish exclusive Jewish sovereignty in a space where Palestinians lived and continue to live.”

B’Tselem said that states and international institutions have a moral and legal obligation to prevent Israel from carrying out crimes against the Palestinian population, stressing the international community’s allowing of Israel to continue attacking Gaza with impunity has led to the normalization of such violence in the West Bank.

The U.S. has largely continued to publicly support the Israeli government, with the Trump administration lifting Biden-era sanctions on violent settlers early in the second term. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have notably hesitated to denounce the U.K. for its new trade ban, though U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee accused the country’s Jewish foreign minister of “Jew hate.”

The bombshell report comes a month before Netanyahu and his far-right government face a contentious election — the first since the Oct. 7 attack, the destruction of Gaza, the increased settler-military violence in the West Bank, the attacks on Lebanon, the war with Iran and the resulting strained international ties. While polls show the race appearing close, it’s unclear whether the increased violence and instability will be enough to oust the prime minister, who has repeatedly voiced opposition to Palestinian statehood.

“Palestinians’ right to liberty, equality, self-deterination and to live collectively as a people are the premise, not a matter subject to the consent of the regime that controls them,” B’Tselem’s report concluded. “Palestinians’ political status and the conditions of their lives cannot continue to be determined through Israeli coercion, military control or arrangements that preserve existing relations of domination.”