Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 28 September 2026
The Elimination Project
Several countries have imposed trade restrictions and sanctions on the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. These include the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. This underlines the growing awareness of what is happening in the West Bank, parallel to Israeli military attacks on the Gaza Strip and south Lebanon, and the need to take action to pressure Israel to stop its actions against the Palestinians.
B’Tselem is one of the most important human rights’ organizations in Israel, established in 1989. The name B’Tselem (in Hebrew literally: in the image of) is an allusion to Genesis 1:27: “And God created humankind in His image. In the image of God did He create them.” (see an earlier blog with B’Tselem reports: https://conquestorleaven.org/please-read-two-btselem-reports/) In September 2026, B’Tselem published a new report entitled “The Elimination Project”.
In its conclusion, the authors write: “This report is being finalized at a time when Israel is rapidly dismantling the conditions necessary for Palestinians to sustain life in the West Bank. Over the past nearly three years, the harm inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank has intensified and expanded, becoming deeper, more widespread, and increasingly overt. Palestinians are killed, their homes are set on fire, the roads they rely on are blocked, families are violently attacked, communities are dispossessed of their land, and fear and terror continue to spread. The West Bank is under a sweeping Israeli assault, and there is no political force in sight working to end the escalation.” (The Elimination Project, 245)
The report draws on “more than two thousand testimonies 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 traces the contours of the mechanism set in place by the Israeli regime to eliminate Palestinian life in the West Bank. It analyses the forms of collaboration between the settlers and the Israeli military, all putting into practice policies formulated in Israeli government offices.
The 249-page report is a chilling testimony to the ongoing catastrophe of the Palestinian people. It categorizes the ways Israel is eliminating Palestinian life under five headlines: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover. It understands these mechanisms as part of a settler-colonial project to ensure the displacement of an indigenous population in favor of the settlers.
The executive summary clearly states: “Defining the Zionist-Israeli project as settler colonialism does not deny Jewish historical, religious and cultural connections to the space, the continuous presence of a Jewish community in it, or the long history of persecution, displacement and violence against Jews. The question it poses regarding the Zionist-Israeli project is not whether a Jewish connection to the space exists, but concerns the ways in which the Zionist project sought to establish exclusive Jewish-Israeli sovereignty in a space where Palestinians lived and continue to live.” (The Elimination Project – Executive Summary, 4)
The report insists: “Human rights documentation, and the public discourse surrounding it, tend to focus on individual incidents of concrete harm. This report takes a broader view, looking at these different violations together. It examines the reality in the West Bank as a complex system with an underlying logic, implemented through different practices by a range of Israeli actors working at the same time and in coordination with one another.” (The Elimination Project, 6) In its conclusion, the report declares; “Protecting human rights requires ending the Israeli apartheid regime, not fixing it. Sporadic fixes cannot turn a settler-colonial project based on dispossession into a system that respects human rights. Palestinians’ rights can never be guaranteed within a system that works to deny them political power, control their land, and dismantle their ability to exist as a collective. A regime based on Jewish supremacy, apartheid, and dispossession is illegitimate. It cannot be accepted or normalized, nor is it enough merely to reduce some of the violence and dispossession it produces.” (The Elimination Project, 248)
Read the full report or an executive summary here:
https://www.btselem.org/the_elimination_project
View a short clip on the Elimination Project