Record expansion of settlements inWest Bank ‘is war crime by Israel’
Illegal homes may make creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible, new UN report says
Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories have expanded by a record amount and may make the creation of an independent Palestinian state impossible, the UN said in a new report on Friday.
Establishing and expanding settlements amounted to the transfer by Israel of its own civilian population into occupied territories, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said.
“Such transfers amount to a war crime that may engage the individual criminal responsibility of those involved,” Turk said.
“Settler violence and settlementrelated violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state,” Turk said. His report will be presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva this month.
The report, based on the UN’s own monitoring and other sources, documented 24,300 new Israeli homes in the occupied West Bank from November 2022 to October 2023, the highest on record since monitoring began in 2017. Israeli plans to build another 3,476 settler homes in the West Bank colonies of Maale Adumim, Efrat and Kethe
dar “fly in the face of international law,” Turk said.
Israel gave the go-ahead for the new homes less than two weeks after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said any settlement expansion would be “counterproductive to reaching enduring peace” with
Palestinians. The Biden administration said last month the settlements were “inconsistent with international law.”
Turk’s report said there had been a dramatic increase in the intensity, severity and regularity of both Israeli settler and state violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. More than 400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces or settlers since Israel invaded Gaza in October.
The policies of Israel’s government, which is the most rightwing in the country’s history and includes extremist religious nationalists with close ties to settlers, appeared “aligned to an unprecedented extent with the goals of the Israeli settler movement to expand long-term control over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to steadily integrate this occupied territory into the state of Israel,” the report said. It documented cases of settlers wearing full or partial Israeli army uniforms and carrying army rifles while harassing or attacking Palestinians, in a blurring of the lines between them. Sometimes Palestinians were shot at point-blank range, it said. More than 490,000 Israelis now live in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, on territory shared with three million Palestinians.