Rights group accuses Israel of dismantling 'Palestinian existence' in West Bank

Israeli rights group B'Tselem said Monday that Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank form part of a greater project designed to make it impossible for Palestinians to exist together as a people.

In a report titled "The Elimination Project", the group alleged five connected Israeli tactics and policies in the West Bank: "violence, ethnic cleansing, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction".

"At the time of publication, the West Bank is under a sweeping Israeli assault that is systematically and at an accelerating pace dismantling the foundations of Palestinian existence," the report said.

The report pointed to violence by settlers and the military against Palestinians, which has left 1,108 dead -- both civilians and militants -- since October 7, 2023, according to an AFP tally based on data from 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 evacuate 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.

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.

The Israeli military said any accusation that it was aiming to eliminate the Palestinians as a people were "false, baseless, and blatantly detached from reality."

It said it "condemns, in the strongest terms, incidences of nationalist violence" in the West Bank and "rejects any claim or implication that it is targeting or persecuting the Palestinian population".

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 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 institutionalised than ever", she added.

Since the beginning of his current term, Netanyahu's government has legalised and approved a record 104 new settlements in the West Bank, a territory the size of the US 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.