Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip seem aimed at creating “permanent demographic change,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said yesterday.
“Taken together, Israel’s actions appear aimed at making a permanent demographic change in Gaza and the West Bank, raising concerns about ethnic cleansing,” Turk said in a speech before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Turk pointed in particular to an ongoing, year-long Israeli military operation in the West Bank’s north that has caused the displacement of 32,000 Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, entire Bedouin herder communities have been displaced by increasing harassment and violence from Israeli settlers, including near Mikhmas to the east of Ramallah, and Ras Ein Al Auja, in the Jordan Valley, since the start of the year.
In addition to roughly three million Palestinians, more than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements and outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.
Israel has approved a series of initiatives this month backed by far-right ministers, including launching a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property” and allowing Israelis to purchase land there directly, in a move condemned by several countries as well as Hamas.
Israel’s current government has accelerated settlement expansion, approving a record 54 settlements in 2025, according to Israeli settlement watchdog NGO Peace Now.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
In the Gaza Strip, most of the territory’s 2.2 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’ unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighbourhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza,” the UN human rights office said in a report last week.
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also vowed to encourage “emigration” from the Palestinian territories in February.
“We will finally, formally and in practical terms nullify the cursed Oslo Accords and embark on a path toward sovereignty, while encouraging emigration from both Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
“There is no other long-term solution,” added Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank.
“They want maximum land and minimum Arabs,” Fathi Nimer, a researcher with Palestinian think tank Al Shabaka, told AFP, referring to a commonly used phrase used to describe Israeli settlement tactics.
• An Israeli air strike killed two Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday, the territory’s health officials said, and the Israeli military said it killed a fighter who posed a threat to its forces in the south of the enclave.
Medics said an Israeli air strike against a group of Palestinians in Gaza City’s Tuffah neighbourhood killed two people and wounded several others. The Israeli military didn’t immediately comment on the report.
Separately, the Israeli military said forces operating in the southern Gaza Strip killed a fighter who posed an imminent threat to them after he crossed into an area still occupied by Israel inside the enclave.
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