Report by Israeli human rights group [B’Tselem] says systematic and broad assault being waged on conditions required for Palestinians’ existence

A Palestinian shepherd from the hamlet of Anizan, where residents have been repeatedly driven out of their homes by settlers. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

Israel accused of trying to ‘eliminate’ living conditions for Palestinians in West Bank

Quique Kierszenbaum in Sair, and Peter Beaumont

Mon 14 Sep 2026

Israel is working towards the systematic “elimination” of the conditions that sustain Palestinian collective life in the occupied West Bank, according to a major report published by the human rights group B’Tselem.

The Israeli organisation’s hard-hitting report, shared with the Guardian in advance of publication, says Israel is “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank”, including “the ability to get to work, take children to school or university, receive medical treatment or municipal services, meet family and friends, cultivate land or go on vacation … routine activities that make up human life”.

According to B’Tselem, the assault on Palestinians is “governed by a coherent organising logic” and comprises five “interwoven domains of action”: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.

The publication of the Elimination Project, B’Tselem’s most comprehensive piece of work on the West Bank since its launch in 1989, comes less than a week after the British foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, accused settler terrorists, supported by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, of committing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, in the UK’s starkest condemnation of Israel since the foundation of the state.

By looking more broadly at the conditions required for Palestinians’ collective existence, however, the B’Tselem report goes further still. It says various arms of the Israeli state – led by Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister with broad powers over civilian matters in the West Bank – are seeking to “create a reality in which millions of Palestinians live in constant fear of Israeli military and civilian violence”.

“Palestinian communities are being pushed out in an accelerating process of ethnic cleansing, while an ever-expanding Israeli presence is being established in their place in the form of settlements, outposts, farms and Jewish-only civilian infrastructure,” the report says. “Elimination in this context means sustained harm to the conditions that enable Palestinians to exist as a people with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history, and a social and political horizon.

“It is an ongoing political project that seeks to re-organise space and the conditions of life so that Jewish presence becomes contiguous, institutionalised and permanent, while Palestinian existence becomes fragmented, vulnerable and dependent.”

One of the most obvious aspects of this fragmentation is the closure of roads and villages to Palestinian passage...READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/sep/14/israel-palestinian-living-conditions-eliminated-west-bank-human-rights-report

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For now, it is Palestinians who are being killed and displaced. But ideologies of supremacy and domination threaten us all- In Gaza, we’ve seen horror unfold with global powers’ support. Is that a blueprint for elsewhere?

Opinion 

Israel 

Ahdaf Soueif 

Fri 11 Sep 2026 

Last week, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, put out an AI-generated video that showed a conveyor belt of overweight Palestinian prisoners – dreaming of food and education – entering one of his prisons; he pops the dream bubbles above their heads and they come out emaciated and crying. Ben-Gvir is building an execution site for Palestinian prisoners with spectator booths, and he recently showed up at Damon prison in northern Israel and taunted female prisoners who complained about the poor conditions. He is digging a moat around a new high-security jail and planning to introduce crocodiles to patrol it. In all this, he has the approval of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while the law that he championed mandating the death penalty for Palestinians deemed terrorists by military courts and convicted for lethal attacks is built on public support.

Sometime around 2017, many Palestinians and their supporters in the global media felt a change. Articles about Palestine no longer drew the hate mail we’d been accustomed to and events in support of Palestinian rights were hardly heckled. It seemed that people were less and less convinced by the image long cultivated by Israel and its supporters – the bearer of “western values” in the Middle East, the home to the “most moral army in the world”, a country acting only in self-defence – while it regularly assaulted Gaza and continued to expand its illegal settlements in the West Bank.

It had been a widely held tenet that if enough people in the democratic western world knew the reality of what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, they would pressure their governments, and Israel would be made to observe the norms of international law. Eventually, a reality would be born in which Jews, Muslims and Christians would live as equals within some political system that would be as good – and as flawed – as others. South Africa was always cited as the example, where rising international pressure over the decades was decisive.

But what looked like the winning of the moral, rational argument was offset by an acceleration of the processes of occupation, an increase in the frequency and blatancy of settler attacks in the West Bank, and of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attacks on Gaza...READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/11/gaza-horror-global-powers-support-blueprint-palestinians-israel

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“What is taking place today in the West Bank is a Chillul HaShem, a violation of God’s name of the worst order. We cannot stay silent. This is terrible for Palestinian people who want to get on with their lives in peace. It is terrible for Israel,” he said. Wittenberg added: “We must speak out. We must do so out of deep concern for what is human and just, and for the sake of Israel and Judaism. We cannot turn away.”

Taybeh, West Bank

Members of the Bedouin community from the West Bank village of Taybeh keep guard to prevent attacks by Israeli settlers from the nearby outpost. Prominent British rabbis have backed sanctions by Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, on Israeli settlements, warning that the time for inaction on settler violence must come to an end. Photograph: Atef Safadi/EPA

Senior UK rabbis come out in support of sanctions on Israeli settlements

Spiritual leaders stress diversity of views within Jewish community and warn against inaction on settler violence

• ‘It’s a good start’: prominent Israelis welcome UK sanctions

Prominent British rabbis have backed Ed Miliband’s sanctions on Israeli settlements, warning that the time for inaction on settler violence must come to an end.

The intervention comes after the UK’s chief rabbi, the spiritual leader of mainstream Orthodox Jews in the UK, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, described UK sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories as a “dark day for British Jews” and warned they could embolden people who “use hatred as a weapon against Jews”.

The sanctions were also condemned by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership council.

But other senior rabbis, many from the progressive wing of the community, have come forward to stress the diversity of views within the British Jewish community, with some backing Miliband’s sanctions, while others warned that concern about the measures should not become an excuse for ignoring settler violence and expansion, and others calling for the government to go further.

Jonathan Wittenberg, a senior rabbi of Masorti Judaism, said he was in the Palestinian village of Umm al Khair while Miliband was delivering his speech, and had seen the results of settler violence “with my own eyes”.

“What is taking place today in the West Bank is a Chillul HaShem, a violation of God’s name of the worst order. We cannot stay silent. This is terrible for Palestinian people who want to get on with their lives in peace. It is terrible for Israel,” he said.

Wittenberg added: “We must speak out. We must do so out of deep concern for what is human and just, and for the sake of Israel and Judaism. We cannot turn away.”... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/sep/09/senior-uk-rabbis-come-out-in-support-of-sanctions-on-israeli-settlements

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Israeli ministers keep telling everyone their brutal plans – so why doesn’t the world take them seriously? Schemes to forcibly remove Palestinians from Gaza are not being promoted by fringe voices. But the international community continues to avert its eyes

Nesrine Malik in The Guardian 

The gap between what is being inflicted on Palestinians and the appropriate reaction on the part of the international community has always been vast. But now it yawns so wide that it swallows reality itself. As arms export licences for Israel from states such as Germany surge, talk of harsher measures and sanctions on the part of other European countries remains talk. People continue to be killed in Gaza, Palestinian families remain besieged in the West Bank, and the Israeli political right has been removing all doubt that these violations are intentional, by telling the world of its hopes and plans.

A sample from only the past few days. On Thursday, Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, detailed a scheme for the illegal ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. He also posted an AI-generated video, now deleted, of Palestinian men entering a conveyor belt into detention, emerging emaciated and tearful. Also a few days ago, the defence minister, Israel Katz, stated that the country was “organised and prepared” to expel Palestinians from Gaza “by every way possible”.

This macabre theatre continues to unfold, its performances less plausible by the day. The Board of Peace promises Gaza will be “redeveloped for the benefit” of its people, while the notion that those same Palestinians in Gaza cannot be allowed to thrive is expressed by Israeli politicians with consistency and a frequency that makes a mockery of the declarations. Last month, the former head of Israel’s national security council, Giora Eiland, pointed out the fact that Israel’s acceptance of Donald Trump’s 15-point plan was a matter of temporary military tactics, rather than long-term peace. “Israel has no interest in Gaza being rebuilt, it’s better for us that it be destroyed for generations to come,” he said... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/07/israeli-ministers-brutal-plans-palestinians-gaza

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Israeli settler violence and escalating Israeli military operations alongside severe movement restrictions, demolitions and widespread displacement “have eroded Palestinian livelihoods and contributed to increased food insecurity...”

© WFP/Hugh Rutherford A family eat lunch in the Bedouin community of Umm Al Khair, West Bank.

Food aid cutback in the occupied West Bank as health fears grow in Gaza

1 September 2026 Humanitarian Aid

Lack of funding has forced the World Food Programme (WFP) to slash aid to families in the West Bank by half even though needs have more than doubled over the past two years.

“We’re running out of funding, and that means that from today, some 200,000 people will lose access to critical assistance,” Shaun Hughes, WFP country director for Palestine, told journalists in Geneva on Tuesday.

He said intensified settler violence and escalating Israeli military operations alongside severe movement restrictions, demolitions and widespread displacement “have eroded Palestinian livelihoods and contributed to increased food insecurity”.

Pushed to the brink

At the same time, a crippling economic crisis “is pushing people to breaking point”, with unemployment more than doubling and over a third of the population struggling to meet their basic needs.

“Food may be available in the markets, but people simply cannot afford it,” he said, speaking from London.

Today, nearly a million people across the West Bank – over a quarter of the population – are now food insecure, he said, adding that “two years ago, that figure was 11 per cent.”

Families ‘in a chokehold’

During recent visits to the territory, Mr. Hughes saw families that used to earn a living from the land “now forced from their homes, their livelihoods destroyed” and facing incredible injustice and hardship.

“They now find themselves in a chokehold, unable to move freely to access land or jobs and so unable to afford food for their families,” he said.

In response to journalists’ questions, he said that the West Bank was not traditionally considered to be experiencing a food crisis, but that increasing pressures were exacerbating food insecurity. 

He added that the very small cash transfers that WFP provided – about 50 shekels per person per month (less than $20) – had become a “real lifeline” for many people and would now be cut off due to the funding shortfall.

Gaza: Don’t look away

Turning to the Gaza Strip, Mr. Hughes said that WFP was also forced to reduce its cash assistance to 75,000 families in July. 

He stressed that the recent slight improvements in food security indicators reported last month “should not create a false sense of security” as two thirds of the population still face critical and emergency levels of hunger. 

He warned that if humanitarian food aid does not continue, “up to 90 per cent of the population will face high levels of acute food insecurity by the end of this year.”

WFP requires $386 million to avoid any further reductions in assistance provided in Gaza and the West Bank over the next six months, he said, urging continued international support and solidarity.

“As global crises multiply and domestic fiscal interests take over, there is a real danger that the world’s attention moves on from Palestine, but the needs of Palestinians, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, have not moved on,” he said.

“Now is not the time to look away.”... READ MORE https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/09/1168237

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Palestinian woman and NBC News team attacked by masked Israeli settlers in West Bank. The woman and crew were treated for injuries..... Between Jan. 1 and July 24, Israeli forces [IDF] or settlers [Zionists] killed 76 Palestinians, according to the latest data available from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Three Israelis were killed over the same period, the data shows.

NBC News journalists were attacked by masked Israeli settlers in the West Bank on Saturday.NBC News

Aug. 29, 2026 

By F. Brinley Bruton 

Masked Israeli settlers attacked and injured a Palestinian woman and members of an NBC News team reporting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday.

Three members of an NBC team were interviewing Aida Ahmed Abdullah and her family in the Palestinian town of Jalud, near Nablus, when the attack occurred. Abdullah said they had been driven out of their home by Israeli settlers, and the team was walking down a hill toward the house.

A gray car with Israeli license plates then drove in reverse up the hill toward them, video of the incident shows.

A masked man in a blue tracksuit, holding a stick, was leaning out of the rear passenger window as the vehicle approached. When the car stopped, at least four men in dark clothes and with their faces covered leaped out, hitting Abdullah and the crew with sticks and throwing rocks at them.

“They jumped out, beat us, then jumped back in the car,” said NBC News international correspondent Matt Bradley, who was hit twice in the arm and later treated at a nearby clinic.... READ MORE https://www.nbcnews.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-nbc-news-team-attacked-masked-israeli-settlers-rcna595024

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The Guardian: Smoke rises after an Israeli attack in Gaza. A witness said the strike targeted the Asqalan prayer hall, which is home to many Gaza residents displaced during the Israeli incursion. More than 100 French and British former diplomats have said Palestine is being erased in front of the world’s eyes and called for urgent action including trade and arms sales bans to press Israel to accept a Palestinian state.

Gaza

Smoke rises after an Israeli attack in Gaza. A witness said the strike targeted the Asqalan prayer hall, which is home to many Gaza residents displaced during the Israeli incursion. More than 100 French and British former diplomats have said Palestine is being erased in front of the world’s eyes and called for urgent action including trade and arms sales bans to press Israel to accept a Palestinian state.  Photograph: Omar Ashtawy/HL/Getty Images

 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2026/aug/28/the-week-around-the-world-in-20-pictures?CMP=share_btn_url#img-10

More photos from Palestine in The Guardian's Gallery: 

 

Gaza

Palestinians walk past the rubble of collapsed buildings at Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. Grassroots Labour groups in the UK are gearing up for a conference showdown with Andy Burnham over Gaza, as the party’s members seek to force the prime minister to recognise Israel’s actions as a genocide and impose a full arms embargo Photograph: Ramzi Abu Amer/JNA/ZUMA/Shutterstock

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2026/aug/28/the-week-around-the-world-in-20-pictures?CMP=share_btn_url#img-11 

Jannatah, West Bank

Israeli settlers confront left-wing activists in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian village of Jannatah. Violent settler attacks in the occupied West Bank under direct Palestinian rule have almost doubled since 2025, as settlers pursue a self-proclaimed ‘great settlement revolution’ in the very heart of the territory earmarked for a Palestinian statePhotograph: Ilia Yefimovich/AFP/Getty Images

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2026/aug/28/the-week-around-the-world-in-20-pictures?CMP=share_btn_url#img-12 

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