Israeli human rights group B’Tselem yesterday accused Israel of seeking to erase the Palestinian presence in the occupied West Bank through a series of interconnected policies aimed at reshaping the territory.
In a statement, the group said Israel is simultaneously employing five mechanisms that reinforce one another to dismantle the collective Palestinian presence and establish a permanent and contiguous Israeli-Jewish presence and sovereignty in the territory.
B’Tselem said Israeli policy in the occupied West Bank entered a new phase at the end of 2022, characterised by increasingly overt and accelerated policies of control, violence and dispossession.
“What Palestinians in the West Bank are experiencing is part of a single political project that permeates every aspect of life,” B’Tselem executive director Yuli Novak said.
She said Palestinian communities are being displaced, the economy is being pushed towards collapse, and millions of people live in constant fear of violence by the Israeli army or occupiers.
According to B’Tselem, the first mechanism is ‘violence and terror’, involving the use of Israeli forces and armed occupiers to intimidate Palestinians and impose violence and coercion.
The group said Israel killed 1,107 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including 245 children, between October 7, 2023, and August 31, 2026.
The second mechanism is ‘ethnic cleansing and takeover of space’, which the group said involves displacing Palestinians from their land while expanding the Israeli-Jewish presence.
B’Tselem said Israel has displaced 75 Palestinian communities to date, while outposts and farms established by occupiers have taken control of about 264,400 acres, equivalent to 18 per cent of the occupied West Bank.
It added that around 33,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from refugee camps in the northern West Bank.
The third mechanism is ‘economic strangulation’, with B’Tselem saying Israel uses its control over Palestinian employment opportunities, tax revenues, the financial system and infrastructure to deepen the economic crisis and Palestinian dependence on Israel.
Palestinian Finance Minister Estephan Salameh warned in July that Israel was moving toward completely withholding Palestinian clearance revenues.
B’Tselem identified ‘social and political destruction’ as the fourth mechanism, saying Israel criminalises attempts at political affiliation, raids and shuts down civil society organisations, suppresses protests and arrests activists, students and journalists.
The fifth mechanism is what B’Tselem described as the ‘political framework’, which it linked to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s 2017 ‘Decisive Plan’.
According to the group, the plan seeks to make Israeli-Jewish sovereignty irreversible through settlement expansion, land seizures and Palestinian displacement, leaving Palestinians with three options: accepting Jewish supremacy, leaving or facing military repression.
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