B'Tselem Report Documents Israeli State Campaign to 'Eliminate' Conditions of Palestinian Life in West Bank

The gate outside Sair had been open that morning. By afternoon it was shut, and Haytham Adnan Murad, 49, had to lift his 12-year-old daughter Balqis out of a taxi and carry her around the roadblock. She cannot walk since recent surgery. They were coming back from a hospital appointment in Hebron.

"When we left, the gate was open. Now it's closed, but this is daily life," Murad said. "There's no dignity in this."

That scene sits inside a much larger document. B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, has published what it calls its most comprehensive report on the West Bank since the group's founding in 1989. Titled the Elimination Project, it argues Israel is waging a coordinated campaign to destroy the conditions that sustain Palestinian collective existence in the territory, organized around five what the report calls "interwoven domains of action": violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.

"Elimination in this context means sustained harm to the conditions that enable Palestinians to exist as a people with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history, and a social and political horizon."

The report puts numbers behind the claim: 1,107 Palestinians killed by Israel in the West Bank since October 2023, and 64 entire communities forcibly displaced in the same period. Those figures come from B'Tselem's own tracking and have not been independently verified in the material shared with the Guardian, but the organization has documented West Bank conditions for more than three decades.

The Decisive Plan

B'Tselem names Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister who holds broad civilian authority over the West Bank, as the figure leading what it describes as a state effort spanning "various arms" of Israeli government. The report identifies Smotrich's 2017 document, known as the Decisive Plan, published before he entered government, as what it calls "the key document for understanding Israeli action in the West Bank."

According to B'Tselem, that plan offered Palestinians three choices: live under what the report calls Jewish supremacy while giving up national claims, leave the territory, or face violent suppression by the military if they resist. The report says the plan's logic has since been "translated into policy, budgets, powers and practices exercised by different arms of the state."

On settler violence specifically, B'Tselem's report departs from a framing of scattered private attacks. It describes settlers operating as part of a broader system of control, at times alongside soldiers, with what the report says is state-provided backing in weapons, equipment, and infrastructure, and with what it calls near-complete impunity.

The report lands roughly a week after British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband accused settlers, backed by Benjamin Netanyahu's government, of carrying out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, a statement described as the UK's sharpest condemnation of Israel since the country's founding. B'Tselem's report goes further, framing the closures, the checkpoints, the shuttered roads and the abandoned homes not as byproducts of security policy but as components of a single, sustained project.