Israel working to eliminate conditions for Palestinian’s survival

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 organization’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 organizing logic” and comprizes 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.