More than 500,000 Israelis currently live in settlements in the West Bank, occupied since 1967 and home to around three million Palestinians.
Violence has risen in recent years, surging especially since Hamas’s Oct 7, 2023, attack, which triggered the Gaza war.
Since the start of the war, Israeli troops and settlers have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, including many militants as well as dozens of civilians, according to an AFP tally based on figures from the Palestinian health ministry.
According to official Israeli figures, at least 44 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or Israeli military operations in the same period.
“ALMOST COMPLETE IMPUNITY”
Since the Gaza war began, Israeli authorities had also “further expanded the use of unlawful force, arbitrary detention and torture”, the report said.
Increased “repression of civil society and undue restrictions on media freedoms (and) severe movement restrictions” had also characterised “an unprecedented deterioration of the human rights situation” in the West Bank, it said.
There had also been rapid expansions of settlements, considered illegal under international law, even as unlawful killings of Palestinians were taking place “with almost complete impunity”, the report warned.
Of the more than 1,500 killings of Palestinians that took place between the start of 2017 and Sep 30 last year, Israeli authorities had opened just 112 investigations, resulting in only one conviction, it pointed out.
The report said it had found “reasonable grounds to believe that this separation, segregation, and subordination is intended to be permanent … to maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians”.
This, it stressed, amounts to a violation of an international anti-racism convention, “which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid”.
The UN rights office on Wednesday urged Israel to end its “unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including by dismantling all settlements and evacuating all settlers, and to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.