Israel Is Stepping Up Its Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank
Even as Israel attacks Iran and Lebanon, it is also intensifying ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The military and settler militias are using a crisis Israel created as cover for its illegal takeover of the West Bank.
Israel’s plan to introduce the death penalty for Palestinian convicts is part of a wider intensification of repression. Imprisoning people en masse without trial is a means of crushing Palestinian society and clearing the way for further settlements. (Nasser Ishtayeh / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Elias Feroz
While international attention is focused on the US-Israeli war on Iran, violence and displacement in the West Bank continue to intensify, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza persists. One of the major groups documenting this violence is the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which has denounced an ongoing genocide against Palestinians.
In an interview with Elias Feroz for Jacobin, Sarit Michaeli, who is B’Tselem’s international outreach director, outlines what she describes as systemic abuses in the West Bank. Their discussion points to a reality of mass detention, oppressive prison conditions, and escalating violence on Palestinian communities across the occupied Palestinian territories.
We first tried to conduct this interview online at the beginning of March, but you had to take shelter because of Iranian counterattacks. What is the situation on the ground like now?
Yes, we had to run in and out of the shelter constantly. But it’s not just the war with Iran — the situation on the ground in the West Bank is also a nightmare, and of course there is Gaza and everything else that is happening.
With so much global focus on the United States and Israel’s offensive against Iran, what immediate effects is B’Tselem seeing on its work and on the situation in the West Bank and Gaza?
Under the cover of war, the cooperation between the military and Israeli settler militias is deepening the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.
Obviously, the new war with Iran is focusing attention and everyone’s energy. It’s also physically much more difficult to go out from the vicinity of your home because you’re constantly under these barrages of missiles, so people tend to stay close to shelters. Because of that, I think fewer people are going out to the West Bank to provide a protective or solidarity presence.
But the main thing is that the settlers, the army, and the [Israeli] authorities in the West Bank are using this as another opportunity to further push out Palestinian communities throughout Area C [the part of the West Bank that is under full Israeli civil and military control under the Oslo Accords, making up about 60 percent of the territory], away from the open spaces of the West Bank to the densely populated enclaves.
And in Gaza, the US-Israeli attack on Iran has effectively frozen what little progress there had been since the so-called ceasefire — including any movement toward improvement in the humanitarian situation.
The last time we spoke, in summer 2025, B’Tselem had just published a report about the genocide in Gaza. What is your assessment of the ceasefire announcement in October last year?
Obviously, Israel is killing less Palestinians in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire, but it hasn’t stopped completely. There are still hundreds of people who have been killed by Israel since then, and many of the other indicators remain very similar, especially now that Israel restricted — almost automatically at the start of its assault on Iran — the limited entry of humanitarian aid, the distribution of food, and other basic supplies that had previously resumed.
We have also published a number of reports and social media posts pointing out that this is not actually a ceasefire, since the violence never really stopped.
You recently also published a follow-up report on the situation of Palestinian detainees.
This most recent report, with the title Living Hell, is more or less an update to the report Welcome to Hell B’Tselem published in August 2024 on this subject. There we described policies that amount to torture of Palestinian detainees in the Israeli detention system. We went so far as to say that Israel had turned its incarceration system for Palestinians into a network of torture camps. The recent report — as I said, essentially an update examining what has changed and what developments have taken place — reached the same conclusion.
Fundamentally, the situation has not changed. There have been some small improvements, for example regarding food, but they do not alter the overall picture of torture and abuse. Our findings indicate that this is the result of systemic policies, not the actions of individual members of the prison system. This remains the case today.
B’Tselem notes that the number of Palestinian prisoners has more than doubled, rising from 4,935 in 2023 to 10,863 in 2025. What do you see as driving this dramatic increase, and how has it affected the rights and safety of detainees?
Israel has been engaged in mass arrests in the West Bank for about two and a half years now. This was already a very severe situation before, but after October 7 there were mass arrests both in Gaza and in the West Bank, bringing in huge numbers of detainees.
Many of them — I would say about half of the detainees currently in Israeli custody, from both Gaza and the West Bank — have been detained without trial. In the West Bank, we are talking about administrative detention. When it comes to Gazans, people are held under the so-called Unlawful Combatants Law. But effectively, it is the same thing. These are two aspects of the same policy: holding Palestinian detainees without trial.
Even after the large prisoner exchanges involving Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, the overall numbers and the percentage of Palestinians detained without trial have not fundamentally changed. About half of the people currently in Israeli custody have not faced — and will not face — any sort of trial. They do not know what they are accused of, they do not know what the charges against them are — in many cases there are no formal charges, only claims by the security establishment. And this applies both to detainees from Gaza and from the West Bank.
While Israeli hostages sparked mass demonstrations and media coverage, Palestinian detainees — including minors and administrative prisoners — remain largely invisible to the public.
I was also very supportive of the struggle of the Israeli hostages’ families for a hostage deal and for the government to do what was necessary to bring them back. I thought, and I still think, that the hostages were also abandoned by the Israeli government.
But more broadly, I think there is a lack of willingness in the Israeli public to acknowledge the rights of Palestinian detainees. I don’t want to say this applies to all Israelis, because it doesn’t, but the dominant discourse in Israeli society today largely discounts the idea that Palestinian detainees have rights that should be protected.
How does this attitude translate into government policy?
The government is absolutely committed to the regime that was instituted by Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and was largely inspired by him, creating what we have described as torture camps. I’m not saying all Jewish Israelis support this, but the majority either support it or simply do not take much interest in it and do not feel it’s an issue they need to be concerned about.
I think the clearest example right now is that the new military advocate general has just announced that he intends to drop the charges against those soldiers or security personnel who were indicted for assaulting Palestinian detainees. There has been no broad public outcry — in fact, there is significant support for such decisions.
You also report that eighty-four Palestinian detainees, including a minor, have died in Israeli custody since October 2023. Do you reach out to the prison authorities when publishing these reports, and how do they respond?
Generally, very little information is provided by the Israeli system regarding these cases. In most situations, no autopsies are conducted, and in many cases the bodies are not even returned to their families. This makes it almost impossible to determine the exact cause of death.
Our research is based on careful analysis, including work conducted by Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI). Unfortunately, given the current public climate in Israel and the fact that the prison service operates entirely under the influence of Minister Ben-Gvir, very few people are asking these questions. Authorities and government officials, in particular, do not feel any obligation to provide answers.
Are there any legal mechanisms or avenues available to confront or hold accountable what is happening in the prisons?
There have been various legal actions. One of the main ones, which was theoretically a success, was a legal challenge by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel against the conditions of incarceration.
For example, prisoners were deliberately given so little food that some of them lost dozens of kilograms. Theoretically, this challenge was successful and led to a slight improvement in the amount of food provided to detainees.
But currently in Israel, the situation is not such that the court system can act as a serious critique. The courts either collude with these policies or are under so much pressure themselves that they pick their battles very sparingly and are not going to intervene. In most cases, there is simply no willingness on the part of the Israeli courts to engage in these challenges.
In Israel, the Knesset is debating the reintroduction of the death penalty — a measure that would, in practice, apply only to Palestinians. Considering the lack of accountability you highlighted, does this suggest that Israeli society and policymakers would accept the execution of Palestinians if the law is enacted?
First, it’s important to say that there is no homogeneous Israeli society. There is the Israeli liberal bloc, which is currently a minority, and would generally oppose the death penalty as a matter of principle, and then there is the Israeli settler‑religious‑right‑wing bloc which forms the government.
Those parties and their voters are absolutely supportive of these policies. I would say the vast majority of politicians would vote for them if they could. The reason it’s not being fully promoted right now is due to external pressure; there isn’t enough internal opposition to stop it.
Politically, these measures are very popular within the governing coalition because its voters support them. The political struggle in Israel today is largely between the Right and the far right. Everyone is trying to outflank each other by taking increasingly extreme actions. Public opinion in Israel is often shaped by both the government and far‑right media.
I haven’t seen recent surveys, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a large majority supported the death penalty — obviously only for Arabs, not for Jews or Jewish terrorists.
Looking at all of your recent documentation, what actions would be necessary to counter these developments?
I would say that the basic message is that Israeli policymakers are not going to change any of this unless they face consequences. All of these issues are policies — they are not individual actions, mistakes, or the work of rogue elements. These are formal Israeli government policies being implemented in ways that are simply shocking and devastating for the human rights of detainees that must be protected in any society that claims to be a democracy, regardless of what these detainees are accused of, and, more broadly, for everyone affected.
Ultimately, none of this will change unless the policymakers responsible for setting and implementing these policies are held accountable. This accountability is not going to come from within Israel: it will have to come from external pressure. That is the fundamental point.