Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank form part of a greater project designed to eliminate Palestinians as a people, Israeli rights group B'Tselem said Monday.
In a report titled "The Elimination Project," the group alleged that five Israeli tactics and policies in the West Bank were connected – "violence, ethnic cleansing, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction."
The report pointed to Jewish settler and military violence against Palestinians which has killed at least 1,108 since Oct. 7, 2023, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
It applied the term "ethnic cleansing" to the process by which dozens of small isolated Palestinian communities in the West Bank have been forced to leave their homes due to violence or home demolitions in recent years.
B'Tselem Field Director Kareem Jubran said there were also restrictions on movement, which are enforced with military checkpoints and more than 900 gates that Israel has set up at the entrances to Palestinian towns and villages – including Jubran's last year.
'Settler colonial project'
Together, these policies "dismantle the conditions Palestinians need to continue living here as a people," B'Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak said at a press conference in Jerusalem.
"Calling this a settler colonial project does not deny Jewish connection to this land. It does describe a political project," Novak added.
B'Tselem's report seeks to connect individual incidents and policies in the West Bank and Gaza with wider state policy.
Novak said the outcome of coming Israeli legislative elections next month would have little effect on this broader policy.
"This government didn't create the project. It inherited a violent political system that successive Israeli governments built over decades," she said.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, one of the most right-wing in Israel's history, "made the system faster, more violent and institutionalized than ever," she added.
Since the beginning of his current term, Netanyahu's government has legalized and approved a record 104 new settlements in the West Bank, a territory the size of the U.S. state of Delaware.
The settlements are illegal under international law.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the territory among some three million Palestinians.