The following is the second part of the executive summary of the Elimination Project: Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Collective Life in the West Bank. B’Tselem released this report on September 14, 2026.
Founded in 1989, B’Tselem is an independent Israeli human rights organization that documents human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories — Gaza and the West Bank. The organization is based in Jerusalem and has an office in Washington, DC, known as B’Tselem USA.
“The Zionist-Israeli project demonstrates the key features of settler colonialism: establishing Jewish-Israeli sovereignty in a space inhabited by an Indigenous Palestinian population, while undermining Palestinian existence through marginalization, expulsion, dispossession and fragmentation,” B’Tselem’s report explains.
“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 question it poses regarding the Zionist-Israeli project is not whether a Jewish connection to the space exists but concerns the ways in which the Zionist project sought to establish exclusive Jewish-Israeli sovereignty in a space where Palestinians lived and continue to live.”
World-Outlook has recently covered some of these issues in Israel Isn’t Debating a Palestinian State. It’s Preparing for Expulsion and Ethnic Cleansing of West Bank Plows Ahead.
B’Tselem’s report, however, provides a more comprehensive and historical outline of the systematic effort by the Israeli government and its entire repressive apparatus to eventually cleanse the occupied territories, and perhaps even Israel proper, of all Palestinians.
We are publishing the report that follows for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, and text below are from the original. Photos are by World-Outlook. Due to its length, we are publishing this report’s executive summary in two parts, the second of which follows.
— World-Outlook editors
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(This is the second of two parts. The first can be found in Part 1.)
The Elimination Project
Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Collective Life in the West Bank
September 2026
Executive summary (Part 2)
Movement restrictions
The ability to move through space is a precondition for social, economic, familial and political life. When a person cannot reach their land, a hospital, work, school or the nearest city, land ownership or the existence of social institutions and services lose some of their practical significance.
Israel’s system of control over Palestinian movement rests on longstanding infrastructure: checkpoints between the West Bank and Israel, East Jerusalem and Jordan; internal checkpoints within the West Bank; gates at the entrances to Palestinian communities; the Separation Barrier; bypass roads; roads prohibited or restricted to Palestinian traffic; a permit system; military orders; and various types of physical obstructions.
Together, these have created a fragmented and discontinuous Palestinian space in which Palestinian movement depends on permits and on decisions by soldiers, other armed forces, officials and sometimes also by settlers.
Since October 2023, Israel has used this infrastructure in a more intensive, arbitrary and violent manner. According to B’Tselem data, between October 2023 and June 2026 Israel established more than 200 new checkpoints and blocked dozens of Palestinian communities’ access to main roads, and to roads between Palestinian communities.
Such obstructions are opened and closed without advance notice, short trips stretch into hours, and people do not know whether they will reach work, school or medical care, or whether they will be able to return home. Israel has revoked all permits allowing Palestinians to enter areas within the Green Line.
Alongside official closures, settlers block roads, threaten drivers and attack Palestinians traveling on them, and sometimes pressure the military to close Palestinian traffic routes.
Control over movement operates in two complementary directions: it breaks Palestinian space into enclaves and isolated communities that depend on entrances, gates, permits and alternative, rough roads, while at the same time producing Israeli territorial contiguity through roads and infrastructure that serve Israelis. Movement restrictions are directly linked to dispossession.
When farmers cannot reach their land, shepherds cannot reach grazing areas, workers cannot reach their workplaces, and students, teachers or medical teams cannot reach their destinations, movement restrictions also harm livelihoods, health, education, social ties and the ability to remain on the land. Often, denial of access to land creates conditions for an Israeli takeover of that land. A blocked road or closed gate is therefore not merely a movement restriction; they are an instrument serving the mechanism dispossession and elimination.
Economic strangulation
The economic strangulation of Palestinians in the West Bank harms the material conditions that allow them to earn a living, maintain a home, cultivate land, study, receive medical treatment and plan for the future. It is manifested in poverty, unemployment, and a significant decline in living standards. But it also functions as a mechanism of control and sustained pressure, increasing Palestinian society’s dependence on Israeli rule.
Since 1967, Israel has restricted independent Palestinian economic development, channeled the Palestinian labor force into the Israeli labor market, controlled resources and crossings, and prevented independent development of infrastructure, industry and trade.
The division of the West Bank into Areas A, B and C under the Oslo Accords left most land reserves, natural resources and water sources under Israeli control. The agreements also left Israel in control of the Palestinian economy’s prospects for development and independence by preserving control over imports and exports and over policy areas that directly affect the Palestinian economy.
Since October 2023, Israel has used this dependence more aggressively. It has revoked almost all permits allowing West Bank Palestinians to work inside the Green Line, cutting more than 140,000 people off from their main source of livelihood.
The unemployment rate, which stood at 13.1% in 2022, surged past 31.3% in 2024. Economic distress forced some to risk entering areas within the Green Line without a permit, risking arrest and even death: between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2026, at least 26 Palestinian workers were killed while attempting to cross the Separation Barrier for work.
At the same time, Israel intensified delays and deductions from the tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, impairing the PA’s ability to pay salaries and provide basic services. Israeli control over the Palestinian financial system, water, energy, land and infrastructure enables it to exert sustained pressure that harms households, businesses and Palestinian institutions alike.
For years, Israel has prevented independent Palestinian development of water infrastructure and energy production, while also damaging existing infrastructure and local initiatives to develop alternative energy sources. Economic harm is also inflicted through the other domains of elimination: movement restrictions prevent access to workplaces and markets; violence by the military and settler militias prevents access to farmland, grazing areas and water sources; and territorial takeover blocks Palestinian development.
For many families, farmland, olive trees, vineyards and flocks are not only sources of income but also an economic safety net, an intergenerational connection to the land and a foundation for communal life. Uprooting trees, stealing flocks and keeping farmers off their land do more than harm immediate income. They disrupt traditional agricultural knowledge and attachment to the land, and sever foundations for life built over generations, undermining the ability to stay on the land.
Economic strangulation extends from households to the institutions and services that sustain society. When families cannot buy food, repay debts or send their children to school, and when education, health and welfare systems are forced to operate under chronic budget shortages, Palestinian society’s ability to maintain institutional continuity, community resilience and prospects for the next generation is reduced. Economic strangulation, therefore, is not merely a byproduct of control; it is a mechanism used to dismantle Palestinian existence.
Social and political destruction
Social and political destruction undermines the institutions, relationships and spaces that enable Palestinians to organize, represent themselves, preserve knowledge and memory, and act toward a shared future. Since 1967, Israel has imposed military rule on Palestinians in the West Bank that prohibits or restricts nearly every form of independent Palestinian political activity.
Through military orders and legislation, Israel outlaws civil society organizations and political parties, closes institutions, prevents demonstrations, arrests political activists, and labels political parties, youth movements, popular committees, civil society organizations, student groups, journalists and human rights defenders as “terrorists” or accuses them of “incitement”. Between 1967 and 2019, Israel outlawed more than 411 political organizations, including all major Palestinian political parties.
Since October 2023 Israel has intensified its attack on every form of organization, protest and expression. Israel has arrested elected officials, activists, academics, students and journalists; raided NGO offices; restricted demonstrations and nonviolent protests; and expanded surveillance and arrests over social media posts.
Participation in party or student activity, organizing a demonstration, documenting human rights violations, and even assisting victims of violence can lead to arrest, imprisonment and harm to activists and their families. In this way, incarceration serves not only to punish individuals but also to deter the public and restrict the possibility of collective action.
The suppression of demonstrations, and the routine use of violent and sometimes lethal methods to disperse them, has for years been one of the main ways Israel has undermined Palestinian organizing. In the seven months between 7 October 2023 and mid-May 2024, Israeli forces killed at least 28 Palestinians, including 11 minors, in demonstrations or in connection with them.
By comparison, this figure is almost half the number of Palestinians Israeli forces killed in demonstrations during the entire 13 years preceding October 2023. The intensifying violence and wave of arrests impacted protest organizers and prominent activists as well, resulting, over the course of 2024, in the decline of demonstrations that had taken place for years in villages and towns across the West Bank.
The assault is also directed at the spaces in which shared life is created and preserved: schools, universities, cultural and religious centers, archives, the press and community institutions.
Raids, movement restrictions and economic hardship force educational institutions to reduce teaching hours or stop operating altogether; attacks on journalists and documentation equipment restrict the ability to report what is happening; and Israel’s campaign against UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), which included, among other things, the enactment of two laws banning or restricting the agency’s operations, harms not only the essential services UNRWA provides to refugees, but also one of the central institutional frameworks preserving refugee status and Palestinian political and historical memory.
In public space, this is compounded by the erasure of Palestinian symbols and the saturation of the landscape with Israeli ones. Palestinian flags are removed from homes, institutions and public spaces, sometimes through violence and arrests. At the same time, tens of thousands of Israeli flags are placed along roads and at the entrances to Palestinian communities. Control over symbols is not trivial: it expresses a claim to exclusivity over space, history and the political identity permitted within it.
Even under these conditions, Palestinian political and social life persists. Palestinians continue to organize, document, teach, write, pursue legal action, preserve memory, defend their land, maintain institutions and rebuild community spaces. This continuity underscores that elimination is not a completed state, but an ongoing process deployed against a collective that continues to exist and resist.
Ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover
The way Israel takes over space and the growing manifestations of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank are the clearest expressions of the two dimensions of colonial elimination: dismantling, on the one hand, the conditions for Palestinian existence in the territory, while establishing, on the other hand, a contiguous and institutionalized Israeli space.
Since 1967, Israel has seized upwards of two million dunams (1 dunam = 0.1 hectares), more than one-third of the West Bank, through an array of legal, planning and administrative mechanisms: declarations of “state lands,” “closed military zones,” “firing zones,” nature reserves and archaeological sites; planning and building restrictions; demolition of homes and infrastructure; establishment of settlements; and construction of roads and infrastructure connecting settlements to Israel.
Ostensibly, these are different tools justified on different grounds, but together they shrink Palestinian living space and expand the space available to Jewish-Israelis.
Alongside the official and bureaucratic track, settler militias operate from farms and outposts that receive budgets, equipment, infrastructure and military protection. Establishing agricultural farms and outposts enables small numbers of armed settlers to operate from them as militias and take over vast areas in a short time: they block roads, prevent access to grazing areas and water sources, attack residents, damage property and flocks, and enlist the military and police against Palestinian communities.
As of July 2026, Israel had taken control of more than 1,070,000 dunams through these militias, amounting to 18% of the West Bank. Between 2023 and 2025, 185 new outposts were established, approximately 130 of them farm outposts.
Violence, denial of access to land, demolition of homes and infrastructure, and the absence of protection create a coercive environment in which Palestinian communities cannot remain on their land. As of June 2026, this takeover had led to the expulsion of 64 Palestinian shepherding communities from their homes and the partial expulsion of 15 more. Such forcible transfer does not always require direct physical expulsion; it also occurs when the state or actors operating under its protection make life in a place impossible.
When such a pattern is aimed at removing a particular ethnic or national group from an area, it is commonly described as ethnic cleansing. In the West Bank, this pattern reduces Palestinian presence, expands Jewish-Israeli presence and breaks up the continuity of Palestinian life by pushing Palestinians into enclaves.
Another form of displacement and takeover is evident in the refugee camps in the northern West Bank. Since January 2025, the military has displaced some 33,000 residents of the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps from their homes. It has destroyed buildings and infrastructure, stated that it would maintain its hold on the camps for the time being, and has prevented most residents from returning.
This displacement forms part of a transition to a new phase of military action in refugee camps and other densely populated residential areas throughout the West Bank, larger and more aggressive.
Expulsion from the land is also expulsion from home, community, school and livelihood. After a community is displaced, its land becomes grazing territory for settler farms; access roads are closed, Israeli infrastructure is established in its place, and Palestinian presence is erased from the landscape.
Palestinians sometimes remain only a short distance from their land, but with no ability to return to the way of life, livelihood and community that existed there. Ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover are the result of the combined operation of the other four domains, while also reinforcing their effects. Loss of land damages territorial contiguity, the economic base and the community fabric, further reducing the possibility of sustaining Palestinian life in the space over time.
The legal implications of the Elimination Project in the West Bank
The “elimination project” is not a discrete legal category, but a term that describes the cumulative significance of the apartheid regime together with policies and acts that international law recognizes and prohibits, including annexation, settlement construction, forcible transfer, persecution, systematic violence, and the denial of fundamental rights.
Many of the practices through which the five domains described above are implemented may also constitute violations of the law of occupation and international human rights law, war crimes or crimes against humanity, including unlawful killing, torture, unlawful imprisonment, collective punishment, persecution, expulsion and forcible transfer, and the establishment of settlements. Taken together, they cannot be understood only as separate violations, but as part of an integrated system through which the elimination project is advanced.
The prohibition of apartheid under international law provides the central legal framework for analyzing the regime in the West Bank. The Israeli regime distinguishes between two groups — Jews and Palestinians — and allocates status, rights, protections, and resources differently between them; it maintains an institutionalized system of systematic domination and oppression of Palestinians; and it commits inhuman acts to establish and preserve that domination.
The law of occupation continues to apply in the West Bank, but it is neither an alternative to the apartheid framework nor sufficient on its own to capture the full legal picture. The apartheid regime in the West Bank works mainly through military control, while annexation and settlements entrench Israel’s control over the territory, alter its composition and violate the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. In its July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice held that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and that it must end it as soon as possible.
The broad impunity enjoyed by soldiers, police officers and settlers who harm Palestinians allows the mechanisms of elimination to persist, become entrenched and take root as part of the Israeli apartheid regime.
Between 2016 and 2024, 2,427 complaints concerning harm by soldiers to Palestinians and their property were submitted to the military law enforcement system; investigations were opened in only 22.7% of them, and indictments were filed in only 0.9%.
The same pattern appears in cases involving violence by Israelis against Palestinians: 93.6% of investigation files opened between 2005 and 2025 ended without an indictment, and only 3% ended in a full or partial conviction. Impunity is not restricted to punishment after the fact. It produces conditions in which perpetrators can expect the system to stand behind them, thereby enabling the violence to continue.
Conclusion: The Duty to Stop the Elimination Project and End the Israeli Apartheid Regime
The reality described here leads to a clear moral and political conclusion: the systematic and violent oppression Israel inflicts on Palestinians in the West Bank cannot be ended through more effective enforcement against particularly violent settlers, the removal of certain checkpoints, a partial construction freeze, or piecemeal policy changes.
Such steps may prevent some crimes and rights violations and protect people in specific cases and are therefore important in the immediate term. But they do not alter the structure that produces violence, dispossession and oppression. The practices described in this report are not aberrations but integral to how the regime operates.
Protecting human rights requires stopping the project of elimination and ending Israel’s apartheid regime and military control over Palestinians. Sporadic fixes cannot turn a settler-colonial project based on dispossession into a system that respects human rights. Palestinians’ rights can never be guaranteed within a system that works to deny them political power, control their land, and dismantle their ability to exist as a collective.
A regime based on Jewish supremacy, apartheid and dispossession is illegitimate. It cannot be accepted or normalized, nor is it enough merely to reduce some of the violence and dispossession it produces.
Footage also shows a group of settlers trying to damage cameras to prevent documentation of the attack. None of the assailants were detained.For years, the international community has watched these events as they unfold in the West Bank while continuing to treat them as a series of separate acts and incidents: settlement expansion, settler violence, demolitions, roadblocks, land expropriation, or the killing of Palestinians. Isolated condemnations and repeated calls to show restraint, avoid unilateral steps, or return to the negotiating table give Israel time, latitude and immunity to continue advancing its elimination project.
The political, military and economic support for Israel, and the diplomatic protection it receives, provide the Israeli regime with the resources, legitimacy, and freedom to continue committing crimes against Palestinians.
States and international institutions have a moral and legal obligation to do everything in their power and use all means at their disposal under international law to prevent Israel from continuing its crimes, bring them to an end, and protect Palestinians from them. International impunity prevents accountability for crimes already committed and is also one of the conditions that allows such crimes to continue.
The genocide in Gaza has not prompted the fundamental shift in international policy demanded by the scale of the crimes, and the same policy enables the continued violence, economic strangulation, social and political destruction and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
Analyzing the elimination project also requires attention to the ways Palestinians act within and against it: they hold onto their land, sustain and develop institutions and social and political frameworks, preserve memory and identity, document, organize and resist. These actions are an integral part of the reality described in the report and of the ongoing struggle over space, life within it and the possibility of shaping a Palestinian future.
Any just political order must be grounded in recognition of Palestinians as political subjects with individual and collective rights, not as a population to be managed by Israel or international actors. Palestinians’ rights to liberty, equality, self-determination, and to live collectively as a people are the premise, not a matter subject to the consent of the regime that controls them. 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.
B’Tselem works for a future of freedom, justice, equality, and democracy for all people living between the river and the sea. Such a future requires ending the apartheid regime and military rule over Palestinians, and guaranteeing individual and collective rights, equal political participation, and a meaningful opportunity for everyone to shape their future.
Ending the crimes and rights violations is a necessary condition, but justice also requires recognition of injustices, accountability for crimes committed, and confronting the ongoing consequences of past and present dispossession and displacement, violence, and social and political destruction.
All this requires a fundamental transformation of the existing regime structure and the construction of a system grounded in the equal worth of every human being and guaranteeing the right to live in freedom, equality, safety, and dignity.
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(This was the second of two parts. The first can be found in Part 1.)
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