Israel working to eliminate Palestinian presence from West Bank, NGO warns
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem details five mechanisms used by Israel to dismantle Palestinian collective life.
Israel is executing a systematic and accelerated campaign to dismantle “Palestinian collective life” and establish permanent Jewish-Israeli sovereignty across the occupied West Bank, an Israeli human rights group has warned.
The “Elimination Project”, published on Monday by B’Tselem, details several tactics used by the Israeli government to help it achieve its overall objective of “erasing the Palestinian presence” from the occupied West Bank.
The report argues that while Israeli policies have been rooted in a long-term settler colonial framework, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has entered an accelerated phase of this objective since late 2022, particularly after the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on southern Israel.
To date, at least 75 Palestinian communities have been forcibly displaced, it said. Israel has, via armed settlers, taken control of more than 1,070,000 dunams of land, equivalent to 18 percent of the West Bank as of July, 2026, it said. A dunam is a unit of land area commonly used in the region, equal to 1,000 square meters (about 0.247 acres or 0.1 hectare). Furthermore, about 33,000 Palestinians have been displaced from refugee camps in the northern West Bank.