B'Tselem Report Documents Coordinated Policy Behind West Bank Violence, Checkpoints and Land Seizures

B'Tselem published a report on Monday titled The Elimination Project, arguing that what looks like a scattered series of raids, demolitions and settler attacks across the occupied West Bank is in fact a single, coordinated mechanism aimed at making Palestinian life on the land unsustainable.

The Israeli rights group built the report on nearly 2,000 Palestinian testimonies collected across the territory. Its conclusion rejects the framing of individual incidents as unrelated abuses.

The reality in the West Bank is "neither a temporary crisis nor a collection of random human rights violations," but "an accelerated and explicit phase in an ongoing project of elimination that operates within the Israeli apartheid regime."

According to Al Jazeera's reporting, the report was published days after Israeli forces killed two teenagers during a raid in al-Mughayyir, east of Ramallah, in early September, and after forces demolished every home in Khirbet al-Tabban in Masafer Yatta, leaving roughly 70 people, including 30 children, without shelter. Al Jazeera also reported that settlers have kept three families under siege in Qusra, south of Nablus, for more than a month, cutting off their water and power. These specific incidents are drawn from Al Jazeera's account and have not been independently verified by Occupation Watch.

B'Tselem's framework identifies five fronts it says work together: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and territorial takeover. The group traces the underlying logic to the 2017 "Decisive Plan" authored by Bezalel Smotrich, now Israel's finance minister, which the report says offered Palestinians three choices: accept Jewish supremacy and give up national claims, leave, or face violent suppression.

Movement and money

By December 2025, Israel had at least 925 physical obstacles across the West Bank, the highest figure the United Nations has recorded in two decades, according to Al Jazeera's reporting. Yusef Kashur, a driver and father of six from Dura, south of Hebron, told B'Tselem the expanding checkpoint network had made his work a "torment," forcing him onto long backroads and costing him fares.

"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, according to the report.

The West Bank's unemployment rate roughly doubled to 27.5 percent by the end of last year compared with October 2023, Al Jazeera reported, with about 115,000 Palestinian work permits frozen in that period.

B'Tselem's testimonies describe the pressure following Palestinians onto their own land. Jamil Abu Rayan told the group that after losing an Israeli work permit, he turned to his grapevines near Halhul, only to find settlers had built an outpost on his main plot while soldiers barred him from a second, calling it "state land." He said he lost about 60 percent of his 2025 harvest. Isma'il Khalayleh told B'Tselem a settler pressed a rifle to his forehead in late January and gave him 24 hours to leave the South Hebron Hills.

Peace Now, the Israeli settlement-watchdog group, has said agricultural and grazing outposts have taken control of nearly 20 percent of the West Bank. The UN's humanitarian coordination office recorded more than 1,600 settler attacks, according to Al Jazeera's reporting. B'Tselem says the escalation sharpened after the current government took office in late 2022 and again after October 2023.