Under cover of Gaza war, settlers working to fulfil state goal of Judaizing Area C

19 October 2023

Since the war in Gaza began, violence against Palestinians has shot up in the West Bank. In just ten days, soldiers and settlers have killed 62 Palestinians and injured dozens. Israel has put up roadblocks throughout the West Bank, closed off main roads to Palestinians and significantly restricted their movement.

Israel has also ramped up efforts to drive Palestinian communities and single-family farms out of their homes and land, cynically exploiting the war to promote its political agenda of taking over more land in the West Bank.

To further this goal, state-backed settler violence against Palestinians has risen in both frequency and intensity, with soldiers and police officers fully backing the assailants and often participating in the attacks. Events on the ground indicate that under cover of war, settlers are carrying out such assaults virtually unchecked, with no one trying to stop them before, during, or after the fact.

The transfer efforts are concentrated in eastern slopes of the mountain range east of Ramallah, in the Jordan Valley and in the South Hebron Hills. B’Tselem has received reports of settlers entering Palestinian communities, sometimes armed and often escorted by soldiers, and attacking residents, in some cases threatening them at gunpoint or firing at them. Residents report the assailants also damaged property, including destroying structures, stealing livestock and crops, felling trees, vandalizing water tanks, slashing pipes and smashing solar panels. Settlers also blocked agricultural roads that serve the residents, preventing them from accessing their land. In several cases, settlers and soldiers together ordered residents to leave their homes and lands by a specified time, threatening to harm them otherwise.

Meanwhile, settler networks on social media are awash with incitement and vitriol against Palestinians, including explicit threats to inflict lethal harm on their persons and property. The targeted communities are aware of this rhetoric and know, from experience, that the danger is not merely theoretical but real.

The communities have no choice left. Fearing for their lives, and with no way to generate income or obtain food and water, over the past week 8 entire communities - home to 87 families numbering 472 people, of them 136 minors - have left their homes. In 6 additional communities, where only part of the population departed, 11 families left their homes, numbering 80 people, 37of them minors. In all, 98 families, numbering 552 people including 173 minors, left their homes since Oct 7th. Six other Palestinian communities, numbering more than 450 people, have left their homes in the last two years.

It may appear as though settlers show up at Palestinian communities and start attacking them on their own initiative. In fact, these actions are part of Israel’s well-known, longstanding policy to make life so miserable for dozens of Palestinian communities in the West Bank that the residents eventually leave, seemingly of their own accord. Israel then proceeds to take over the land and use it for its own purposes – mainly building and expanding settlements. This policy has radically intensified under the current government, whose members fully support and even encourage the violent attacks.

This unlawful policy constitutes forcible transfer of residents in an occupied territory. Such transfer is prohibited under any circumstance by international law, which Israel is obligated – and has undertaken – to respect. The fact that soldiers are not physically forcing residents out of their homes is irrelevant: creating a coercive environment that leaves residents no choice but to forsake their homes is enough.

These communities have been left to their fate with no one to protect them. Any attempt they make at self-defense is met with violence by soldiers and settlers. Given the circumstances, the international community is obligated to use its leverage to stop the forcible transfer of these residents and put a stop to the violence against them.

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The Elimination Project: Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Collective Life in the West Bank

Open-Fire Policy

New B’Tselem report: Israel is carrying out an elimination project in the West Bank

B’Tselem’s most comprehensive report to date on Israeli policy in the West Bank finds that Israel is using five mutually reinforcing mechanisms to dismantle Palestinian collective existence there and forcibly reorganize the territory to establish a permanent, contiguous Jewish-Israeli presence and sovereignty.Since late 2022, and especially since October 2023, Israeli policy in the West Bank has entered a new phase. Israel has sharply escalated longstanding policies of control, violence and dispossession, implementing them more openly, more violently and at a faster pace. These measures are also becoming increasingly institutionalized in government policy and practice.With this process intensifying by the day, B’Tselem is publishing The Elimination Project, a 200-page report based on an analysis of approximately 2,000 testimonies from Palestinians in the West Bank, additional field research and decades of documentation. The report traces the acceleration and expansion in recent years of longstanding Israeli policies and practices.“What Palestinians are living through in the West Bank is not a series of separate incidents. It is a single political project that reaches into every part of life,” said B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak. “Communities are being expelled, the economy is being pushed toward collapse, and millions are living in constant fear of Israeli military or settler violence. These mechanisms work together to dismantle Palestinian collective life while entrenching a permanent system of Jewish supremacy across the West Bank. The world is watching and still failing to respond with anything close to the urgency this demands.”How the Elimination Project worksThe report identifies five interconnected mechanisms through which Israel is advancing this project across the West Bank:Violence and intimidation: Israel is using military forces and armed settler militias to impose violence, fear and coercion. From 7 October 2023 through 31 August 2026, Israel killed 1,107 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 245 children.Ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover: Israel is using military operations, demolitions and state-backed settler farms and outposts to drive Palestinians from their land and expand Jewish presence there. To date, 75 Palestinian communities have been forcibly displaced; settler farms and outposts have taken control of 1.07 million dunams of land (18% of the West Bank); and about 33,000 Palestinians have been displaced from refugee camps in the northern West Bank.Movement restrictions: Israel is fragmenting Palestinian space through checkpoints, gates and roadblocks. By the end of 2025, OCHA documented 925 movement obstacles throughout the West Bank.Economic strangulation: Israel is using its control over employment, Palestinian revenues, finance and infrastructure to deepen economic crisis and dependence. Unemployment rose from 13.1% in 2022 to over 31% in 2024, amid mass permit revocations and intensified withholding of revenues.Social and political destruction: Israel criminalizes political organizing, raids and shuts down civil society offices, suppresses protests and arrests activists, students and journalists. Since October 2023, Israel has arrested at least 60 Palestinian journalists from the West Bank.The political blueprint: The report identifies Bezalel Smotrich’s 2017 Decisive Plan as a key document for understanding the current escalation. Its strategy of “victory through settlement” seeks to make Jewish sovereignty irreversible through settlement expansion, land takeover and Palestinian displacement, while leaving Palestinians three options: submit to Jewish supremacy, leave, or face military repression. Though the plan was never formally adopted as government policy, Smotrich now holds broad powers over planning, land and enforcement in the West Bank, and core elements of its logic are increasingly reflected in state policy and practice.Decades in the making: The Elimination Project long predates the 2017 plan and the current Israeli government. B’Tselem situates the current Israeli assault on Palestinian life within a long-term settler-colonial project operating through Israel’s apartheid regime. In the Gaza Strip, this logic has reached its most extreme form in the genocide Israel is committing; in the West Bank, the current government has accelerated the project and made its mechanisms more overt.International responsibility: B’Tselem calls on governments and international institutions to stop treating Israel’s violations as isolated incidents, stop enabling Israel’s crimes, protect Palestinians and act to end Israel’s apartheid regime and military rule. A just future requires a political order based on freedom, justice, equality and democracy for all who live on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, with full realization of individual and collective rights and equal political participation.B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak said: “Palestinians are being left exposed to escalating violence while Israel advances its project of elimination in the West Bank. Governments cannot condemn these crimes while granting Israel the impunity to continue. Together with international institutions, they must use every means available under international law to stop Israel’s crimes and halt the machinery of violence and destruction that is tearing Palestinian life apart.”The full report, executive summary, maps, and graphs are available at the following link: https://www.btselem.org/elimination/?lang=en

14 September 2026

Open-Fire Policy

The Elimination Project

Since the current Israeli government took office at the end of 2022, and even more so since October 2023, Israel has dramatically escalated its assault on all aspects of Palestinian life in the West Bank. At any moment, Palestinians may be exposed to violence by soldiers or armed settler militias, arrested and imprisoned, subjected to abuse and humiliation, and sometimes even killed.The Elimination Project draws on more than 2,000 testimonies B’Tselem collected from Palestinians since October 2023 and over three decades of documenting the Israeli apartheid regime’s human rights abuses in the West Bank. The report looks at the current reality not as a collection of isolated incidents or specific harms, but as part of a comprehensive mechanism of elimination that works to dismantle the conditions for continued Palestinian existence in the West Bank, while deepening Jewish control and supremacy in an irreversible manner. An examination of the current reality in the West Bank reveals that the project of elimination is now being implemented more openly, directly and violently than before, and increasingly relies on cooperation between official state authorities and settler militias operating in the West Bank with state backing and support.

14 September 2026

Settlers entering Jalud. Still from security camera footage, courtesy of the residents

Settler Violence = State Violence

Qusrah, Talfit and Jalud, Nablus District: Residents of three villages subjected to extreme settler violence since a new outpost was established between them

On 21 January 2026, settlers established the outpost of Tel Talpiyot at the top of a hill known as Jabal 'Ein 'Ena on Talfit village land. The spot, which lies deep within Area B in the midst of Palestinian villages, is far from Area C and has had no previous settler presence.While establishing the outpost, the settlers took over an unfinished house belonging to a Talfit resident and prevented its continued construction. Since then, the villages of Talfit, Qusrah and Jalud have been suffering from severe violence at their hands. In the month after the outpost was established, B’Tselem documented 10 serious attacks against residents, as well as a brutal assault on human rights activists who were accompanying a family driven out of their home by the violence. The assailants used stones and clubs, set homes on fire, and vandalized and torched vehicles. [block:settlers_blog_map_block nid=217668 updates=217835,217836,217837,217838,217841,217842,217812,217849 arrows hide_nid]Click on the icons on the map for details of some of the attacks between January and March 2026. In some cases, they were filmed arriving on an ATV similar or identical to those distributed by the ministries of finance and settlement, on the initiative of Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Orit Strock.On 14 March 2026, settlers who attacked homes on the western outskirts of Qusrah killed Amir ‘Odeh, 28, when he advanced with his father and several other residents toward them after they had gone a short way in the direction the outpost. Knowing this was the second attack on area homes that day, the residents feared the settlers would return. After a brief exchange of stones at a distance of about 100 meters, one of the settlers opened fire at the residents, shooting ‘Odeh in the chest and wounding two others in the leg. When ‘Odeh’s father tried to help him, the settlers attacked father and son with blows, beating them with club and stabbing them until the father lost consciousness. Only after the settlers went further away toward the outpost were the residents able to take the two men to the hospital, where ‘Odeh was pronounced dead.

27 May 2026