Israel committed extermination in West Bank: UN probe

Israel has committed the crime against humanity of “extermination” in the occupied West Bank while continuing to commit “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza, UN-mandated investigators said Monday.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry said Israeli forces had also committed other crimes against humanity and war crimes in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.

The commission, which does not speak for the UN itself, concluded in a September 2025 report that Israel had committed “genocide” in Gaza following Hamas’s deadly 7 October 2023 attack on Israel — a finding Israel rejects.

In its latest report, issued a day before Israel’s general election, the commission said Israeli military operations, reinforced by sustained settler violence, amounted to a “widespread and systematic attack” against Palestinian 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,” it said, as well as persecution based on nationality, race and ethnicity.

Israel’s mission in Geneva rejected the report as part of an “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,” it said.

The three-member commission was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021. Its latest report examined killings and physical and psychological harm caused by Israeli and Palestinian security forces since October 2023.

It said the situation in the West Bank had deteriorated severely since Hamas’s attack and accused Israeli authorities of intending to “collectively punish” Palestinian civilians in response.

“The targeting of Palestinian civilians across different locations in the West Bank indicates a high level of coordination and organised planning and is the product of state policy,” the report said.

Commission chairman Srinivasan Muralidhar said the killing and wounding of Palestinian civilians and destruction of homes, combined with Israel’s denial of responsibility, formed part of a broader strategy to “exterminate and displace Palestinians”.

The report also identified cases in which Israeli forces allegedly intended to seriously harm or kill civilians, amounting to war crimes including wilful killing.

The Hamas attack in October 2023 killed 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures. Israel’s subsequent military offensive has displaced nearly Gaza’s entire population and killed more than 74,200 people, according to the territory’s health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN.