Israel committing crimes against humanity in occupied West Bank: UN

Israel has committed crimes against humanity, including “extermination”, in the occupied West Bank, United Nations-mandated investigators have reported.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said on Monday that the Israeli government and its forces are also responsible for other war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian territory, including torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence.

The release of the report came as Israeli forces carried out a clampdown , including expulsions and home demolitions, in Hebron following a gun attack last week.

The commission, which does not speak for the UN itself, first determined in a September 2025 report that Israel had committed “genocide” in its war on Gaza. That followed Hamas’s deadly October 7, 2023 attack on Israel – Israel flatly rejects the finding.

In its new report, issued the day before Israel’s general election , the commission found that in the West Bank – which Israel has occupied since 1967 – Israeli military operations , reinforced by sustained settler violence, constitute a “widespread and systematic attack” against civilians.

“The Israeli authorities and forces have committed the crimes against humanity of extermination, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence in the West Bank, as well as persecution based on intersecting discriminatory grounds, with nationality, race and ethnicity at its core,” it said.

Israel’s mission in Geneva said the report was part of the inquiry’s “misinformation campaign to demonise the State of Israel and portray its very existence as criminal”.

“The international community must reject these distortions, repudiate the commission’s findings and demand its immediate dissolution,” the mission said in a statement.

The three-member UN investigative team was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021.

Former South African High Court judge Navi Pillay, who chaired the investigation until last November, won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month.

The commission’s new report is focused on killings and bodily and mental harm caused by both Israeli and Palestinian security forces since October 2023.

It found that the situation in the occupied West Bank has deteriorated gravely since the Palestinian armed group Hamas’s attack from Gaza that month.

The commission found that the Israeli authorities “intended to collectively punish” West Bank civilians due to the Hamas attack.

Israel’s military offensive on Gaza has displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza and killed at least 74,500 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, between October 7, 2023 and October 9 this year, 1,143 Palestinians – at least 250 of them children – were killed in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.

Later on Monday, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Volker Turk, condemned the ongoing Israeli operation in the West Bank city of Hebron , saying threats to empty and erase neighbourhoods raise “serious concerns of ethnic cleansing”.

Israeli forces imposed a lockdown across Hebron on Friday following the gun attack near the city, and Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to lock down the entire West Bank .

Turk’s statement noted that the lockdown has already resulted in the forcible displacement of over 2,000 Palestinians, the demolition of homes and the prevention of residents from moving freely.

“The sweeping steps taken raise grave concerns of unnecessary and disproportionate use of force – which must end,” he said.

“The Israeli lockdown is confining many to their homes and their immediate neighbourhoods. Declarations by senior Israeli government officials indicate that the measures implemented are punitive in nature and designed to instil fear. This is unacceptable,” Turk added.

Israeli ministers have previously called for the occupied West Bank and Gaza to be ethnically cleansed.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in an interview with the news outlet Ynet News last month that Israel should “go to war” in the occupied territory and repeat what it “did in Gaza”.

He added that Israeli forces had “cleared out” Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank.

Since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza, arrest campaigns have increased in the West Bank, with settler pogroms also continuing. The government is encouraging the expansion of settlements, which are illegal under international law, despite a backlash from some Western officials.

Turk insisted that people displaced under the clampdown must be allowed to return home and that “Israel must ensure compensation and reparation for unlawful evictions and demolitions”.

“Collective punishment is a grave violation of international law,” he said.