‘Israel is systemically eliminating Palestinian collective life’:  B’Tselem

The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has released a damning indictment of the Israeli assault on Palestinian life, charging the Israeli government with “carrying out an elimination project in the West Bank”.

The report calls on the international community to “use all means at their disposal under international law to prevent Israel from continuing its crimes, bring them to an end, and protect Palestinians from them”.

The report comes as 12 countries, led by the UK, introduce new sanctions against settlements and as Israel's election campaign heats up.

The key claim in the report is that Palestinians are not suffering from individual incidents of violence but from a systematic assault intended to destroy their way of life.

“Israel's actions in the West Bank are not simply a series of separate violations of individual and collective rights. Rather, they are part of a comprehensive mechanism of elimination.

“In this context, "elimination" means sustained harm to the material, social and political conditions that enable Palestinian collective existence – land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history – as well as to the possibility of imagining and sustaining a shared future. Israel's project of elimination in the West Bank is reshaping the territory and the conditions of life within it so that Israeli control and Israeli presence become continuous, entrenched, and permanent, while Palestinian existence becomes fragmented, vulnerable, and dependent,” the report declares.