How Israel systematically dismantles Palestinian life in occupied West Bank: The Elimination Project
Leila Warah reports in Al Jazeera on 14 September 2026:
On any given week, Palestinians across the occupied West Bank can experience dozens of what appear to be isolated acts of Israeli violence and suppression.
In early September, Israeli forces killed two teenagers during a military raid in al-Mughayyir, east of Ramallah. Days later in Masafer Yatta, Israeli forces demolished every home in Khirbet al-Tabban, leaving about 70 people, including 30 children, without shelter. In Qusra, south of Nablus, settlers have kept three families under siege inside their homes for more than a month, cutting off their water and power.
In a new report published on Monday, Israeli rights group B’Tselem argued these are not separate incidents. Together, they work towards a single end: Making Palestinian life on the land unsustainable and replacing it with permanent Israeli control. The reality in the West Bank, the group said, is “neither a temporary crisis nor a collection of random human rights violations”.
Instead, 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”, the publication – called The Elimination Project – added.
‘The Elimination Project’
Drawing on nearly 2,000 Palestinian testimonies, the report said that seemingly separate Israeli violations are part of what it called “a comprehensive mechanism of elimination”. By “elimination”, B’Tselem referred to the systematic dismantling of Palestinian society, eroding its institutions, economy, freedom of movement and social life.
The report placed this within what it called the “basic logic of settler colonialism”: Establishing “permanent settler sovereignty over a territory already inhabited by an Indigenous people” by “pushing them out, dispossessing them and dismantling their collective existence”.
It identifies five interconnected fronts through which that process operates: Violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.