A major new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem titled “The Elimination Project” accuses Israel of “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank.”
“For too long, Israel’s policies in the West Bank have been treated or looked at as isolated events,” says Ori Givati, director of international relations at B’Tselem. “We actually find that there is one very coherent logic behind all of them, and this is the logic of elimination of Palestinian collective life in the West Bank.” Givati says tactics against Palestinians intensified with Israel’s 2022 election and again after October 7, 2023, adding that “we are definitely seeing a lot of the mechanisms, the tools that were used and are used still … in Gaza, being implemented in the West Bank.”
We also speak with Mohammad Sha’ban, a Palestinian farmer from Halhul in the Hebron area of the occupied West Bank who says 11 gates and seven settler outposts have been installed around Halhul since 2025. “We cannot reach our lands. We cannot go outside Halhul. They open only one gate from 8 o’clock until 5 o’clock every day,” says Sha’ban. Settlers “attack farmers, beat farmers … damaging our cars, also damaging our fields, uprooting our trees.”
