B'TSELEM ACCUSES ISRAEL OF DISMANTLING PALESTINIAN LIFE IN WEST BANK

B'Tselem, an Israeli rights group, said on Monday that Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank amount to a coordinated effort to make Palestinian existence there unsustainable. The report, titled "The Elimination Project", names five tactics: violence, ethnic cleansing, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, and social and political destruction. It said the West Bank is under a sweeping Israeli assault that is dismantling the foundations of Palestinian existence at an accelerating pace. B'Tselem described this as an explicit phase of an ongoing project of elimination, rather than a temporary crisis, operating within what it called the Israeli apartheid regime and driven by a settler-colonial logic of dispossession.

The report drew on nearly 2,000 Palestinian testimonies, B'Tselem said. It cited the killing of two teenagers by Israeli forces during a raid in al-Mughayyir, east of Ramallah, in early September. 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 besieged three families in their homes for more than a month, cutting off water and power. An AFP tally based on Palestinian health ministry data recorded 1,108 deaths, both civilians and militants, in the West Bank since 7 October 2023.

B'Tselem applied the term ethnic cleansing to the forced evacuation of dozens of small, isolated Palestinian communities across the West Bank, citing violence and home demolitions. It said incidents often reported individually, including raids, demolitions and settler sieges, function together as what it called a comprehensive mechanism of elimination. B'Tselem is based in Israel and has previously applied the term apartheid to Israeli policy towards Palestinians. The report includes no Israeli government response to its findings.