How Israel systematically dismantles Palestinian life in occupied West Bank 

Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – 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.

B’Tselem traced that logic to the 2017 “Decisive Plan” authored by Bezalel Smotrich, now Israel’s finance minister. The plan, the group said, gave Palestinians three choices: Accept Jewish supremacy while giving up their national claims, leave, or face violent suppression.

None of this is new, the report argued; the mechanism has run for decades. What has changed is that it has grown far more severe and open, escalating since the current far-right government took office in late 2022 and sharply after the start of the genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in October 2023.

The reality on the ground

For roughly 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, that system is felt in the steady narrowing of daily life: Roads they cannot use, land they cannot reach, and fewer places where they can safely live, work and move.

By December 2025, Israel had at least 925 physical obstacles set up across the West Bank, the most the United Nations has recorded in two decades.

Yusef Kashur, a driver and father of six from Dura, south of Hebron, told B’Tselem that the growing network of gates and checkpoints had turned his work into a “torment”, forcing him onto long, dangerous backroads and to turn down fares he once relied on.

“These drives are exhausting, take a very long time, and the fuel costs so much that I don’t make enough to cover our household needs,” he said.

The restrictions feed a wider collapse. Under an occupation that controls its borders, trade and revenue, the West Bank economy has little room of its own, and it has buckled: Unemployment at the end of last year had roughly doubled to 27.5 percent compared to October 2023, driven in part by the freezing of work permits for about 115,000 Palestinians.

The squeeze is deliberate, the report argued: A family that cannot earn is easier to uproot, and when Palestinians fall back on their own land, the pressure follows them there.

After losing his job inside Israel, Jamil Abu Rayan turned to his grapevines near Halhul, only to find settlers had established an illegal outpost at his main plot. Soldiers also barred him from another plot, calling it “[Israeli] state land”.

He told B’Tselem he lost about 60 percent of his 2025 grape harvest and that he can no longer properly work his land.

Recounting a late January attack in the South Hebron Hills, where entire communities face forcible displacement, Isma’il Khalayleh told the rights group earlier this year that a settler pressed a rifle to his forehead and gave him a deadline: “I’m giving you 24 hours to leave this place.”

Agricultural and grazing outposts have “violently taken control” of nearly 20 percent of the West Bank, according to Israeli settlement-watchdog group Peace Now. More than 1,600 settler attacks were recorded by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) last year.

The same pressure extends to where Palestinians can build; Israeli authorities make it “virtually impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits”, according to OCHA, leaving many families who build without them under constant threat of Israeli demolition.

As Palestinian communities are cleared, more illegal Israeli settlements expand. The current government has approved a record 104 new settlements since 2022.

The suppression also extends to the institutions that hold Palestinian society together, with B’Tselem documenting a series of raids and closure orders faced by charities, trade unions and universities.

Ahmad Dweikat told the rights group that in May 2026, soldiers ransacked a Nablus association he co-founded to help women, children and families, confiscating computers and cash, including money set aside for orphans.

Running beneath all of it is the military’s lethal force. B’Tselem counted about 1,087 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since October 2023, roughly a quarter of them children.

Among them was Jamil Hanani, a 17-year-old boy from Beit Furik who was shot during an army raid on the town. “It’s as if they go out hunting, only they’re hunting human beings,” his father, ‘Atef Hanani, told B’Tselem.

The system behind the violence

For years, foreign governments have urged Israel to show restraint. That framing misses the point, B’Tselem argued: The violence, closures and demolitions are not failures of the system, but the system working as intended.

Sanctioning an individual settler, reopening a road or freezing a single settlement plan would “leave intact the structure that produces violence, dispossession, and oppression”, it said.

Seen this way, the question is not whether each individual act is an isolated violation, but what they produce together: A steadily shrinking space for Palestinians to live, work, build and remain on their land.

And the West Bank, the report argued, cannot be read apart from Gaza. The two are “different manifestations of the same regime project, directed against Palestinians’ ability to exist as a people”.