According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Israel has forcibly displaced more than 36,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank within one year. The report warns that illegal Israeli settlement expansion and a push to annex the territory are accelerating, with settler violence increasing by 24% compared to the previous year.
The report documented 1,732 incidents of Israeli settler violence causing casualties or property damage from November 2024 to October 2025, up from 1,400 incidents in the same period a year earlier. It found that settler violence continued in a coordinated, strategic, and largely unchallenged manner, with Israeli authorities allegedly playing a central role in directing, participating in, or enabling this conduct.
Combined with Israeli forced displacement orders, home demolitions, and military violence, these attacks have pushed tens of thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes across the West Bank. This includes approximately 32,000 Palestinians forced out of refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarem, Nur Shams, and Far’a during an Israeli army operation. The UN report stated that this displacement represents the mass expulsion of Palestinians on an unprecedented scale, amounting to unlawful transfer prohibited under international humanitarian law.
The displacement in the West Bank, coinciding with extensive displacement in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military, purportedly indicates a concerted Israeli policy of mass forcible transfer throughout the occupied territory, aimed at permanent displacement and raising concerns of ethnic cleansing. Palestinians in the West Bank have faced intensified military and settler attacks amid the war in Gaza, with at least 1,071 Palestinians killed there since October 2023.
In one of the latest deadly incidents, Israeli forces on Sunday killed four members of a Palestinian family, including two children, in the village of Tammun near Tubas in the northern West Bank. Heba Morayef, Middle East and North Africa director at Amnesty International, criticized this as part of a pattern of increasing use of deadly force by Israeli forces against Palestinians, expressing deep concern that the attack may amount to an extrajudicial execution.
The Israeli government has also drawn international condemnation after approving plans to extend its authority over more of the West Bank, a move denounced by experts as de facto annexation and a violation of international law. The UN previously warned that Israel’s annexation push will undoubtedly accelerate the dispossession of Palestinians and their forcible transfer, leading to more illegal Israeli settlements.
Source: www.aljazeera.com