The UN Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory found on Monday that Israel has committed the crime against humanity of extermination in the West Bank, together with torture, rape and other sexual violence, and persecution on grounds of nationality, race and ethnicity, and that it is still committing genocide in Gaza a year into the ceasefire. The report came out the day before Israel's election and goes before the UN General Assembly in New York on Monday.
Israeli military operations, reinforced by sustained violence from Israeli terrorists, commonly referred to as settlers, amount to a widespread and systematic attack on Palestinian civilians, the three-member commission found. Israeli authorities intended to collectively punish the civilians of the West Bank after October 2023, the targeting of Palestinians across the territory shows a high level of coordination and organised planning and is the product of state policy, and the authorities knew of and intended the terrorists' violence as part of that attack.
"The intentional killing and injuring of Palestinian civilians and destruction of homes in the West Bank combined with Israel's persistent denial of responsibility form part of a broader strategy to exterminate and displace Palestinians and impose conditions of life that are unliveable," said the commission's chair, Srinivasan Muralidhar. Israeli air strikes killed 254 Palestinians in the West Bank between October 2023 and September 2026, against six in the fifteen years before, and Israel's operations since January 2025 had displaced at least 34,176 people by August, the largest displacement in the West Bank since 1967.
The commission documented cases in which Israeli forces intended to seriously harm and kill civilians, which are war crimes including wilful killing, and found that sexual violence was used to displace and intimidate Palestinian communities. It told Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, to act on its obligations to prevent and punish genocide and incitement to genocide, to end the occupation and to remove every settler and settlement.
Israel's mission in Geneva called the report part of a "misinformation campaign to demonise the State of Israel and portray its very existence as criminal" and demanded that the commission be dissolved. The commission, set up by the Human Rights Council in 2021, first found in September 2025 that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, and Navi Pillay, who chaired it until November 2025, won this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
The report also found that the Palestinian Authority targets Palestinians who voice dissent, resulting in killings, that its violence targets members of opposing armed groups, and that it has failed to conduct prompt, effective and impartial investigations into killings.
Israel sealed the West Bank and forcibly displaced thousands of Palestinians in the week before the vote, and has killed 1,559 Palestinians in Gaza since the ceasefire of October 2025. The full toll of the genocide is on our Gaza record.
