Rights and Accountability 19 March 2025
A view on the Israeli outpost of Gal Yosef, taken from the West Bank village of Khirbet al-Marajim, south of Duma, after Israeli settlers stormed the village the night before, 15 March.
ActiveStills“We are witnessing new ‘Trails of Tears’ in the West Bank, mirroring Gaza’s fate.”
These were the words of Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the occupied West Bank and Gaza, on Tuesday. She was referencing the forced expulsion between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government of tens of thousands of Indigenous people from their homeland east of the Mississippi toward what became Oklahoma, leading to the deaths of thousands.
“What Israel is doing in occupied Palestine today has strong echoes of 1947-1949 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa,” Albanese said, referring to the two major ethnic cleansing campaigns carried out by Zionist militias and the Israeli army that produced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced throughout Israel’s ongoing military assault in the West Bank, with only 3,000 Palestinians returned to their homes.
Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz last month indicated that this displacement would be permanent as the Israeli army makes preparations for a long occupation of the northern refugee camps as the military assault nearly enters its third month.
Albanese warned that a mass ethnic cleansing campaign is underway, as Israel uses the fog of war to advance its long-standing objective of seizing Palestinian land.
“The world meanwhile is pretending not to see history repeating itself,” she said.
War crime
Albanese’s statement was issued on the same day as a report by the UN Human Rights Office detailing Israel’s advancement of settlements in the West Bank between November 2023 and October 2024, and the illegal transfer of Jewish Israelis there.
The report stated that Israel’s maintenance and expansion of settlements “amount to annexation” of large parts of the West Bank.
The Israeli government allocated $200 million to settlement projects from its budget in 2024 – including for constructing roads between settlements, funding “outposts” or backing so-called “security” for settlements and outposts.
These acts “amount to the transfer by Israel of its population” to occupied Palestinian territory.
“The transfer by Israel of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies amounts to a war crime,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said.
More than 10,000 housing units were advanced or approved in existing settlements in Area C over the reporting period. Area C is the 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli military control according to the Oslo accords of the 1990s. But in reality, the Israeli military controls the whole of the West Bank and has been conducting raids in the smaller areas where the Palestinian Authority has nominal control.
By the end of October 2024, there were nearly 740,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. All of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights are illegal under international law and are considered a war crime.
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is illegal and must end.
“Israel’s conduct aiming to ethnically cleanse the land between the river to the sea, amounts to a genocidal campaign to erase Palestinians as a people,” Francesca Albanese added.
Settler violence
A “climate of revenge” has prevailed in the West Bank since 7 October 2023. Settler violence has skyrocketed, leading to the forcible displacement of Palestinians from herding communities.
“The line between settler and state violence blurred to a vanishing point, further enabling an increase in violence and impunity,” the UN report states.
“Palestinian victims of violence increasingly referred to ‘settler-soldiers’ when recounting incidents to OHCHR [the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights].”
The monthly average of settler violence in 2024 was 118 incidents.
This was an increase from the 108 average of 2023, which was a year in which “settler violence had already reached unprecedented levels.”
Nearly 1,300 incidents resulted in casualties or property damage that year. That was a 51 percent increase in the number of incidents during 2022 and more than a two-fold increase on the number of incidents during 2021.
Destruction in refugee camps
Meanwhile, as Israel pounded Gaza in the early hours of Tuesday killing hundreds of Palestinians, the Israeli military assault on the West Bank’s refugee camps continued unabated.
This has been the worst military assault on the West Bank since the second intifada nearly two decades ago, said Albanese.
Nearly 70 Palestinians have been killed since January.
The Israeli army uprooted around 85 percent of the streets of Jenin refugee camp in the north, the municipality’s director Mamdouh Assaf said.
One quarter of the refugee camp’s population has been forcibly displaced, the city’s mayor said in a statement.
Throughout January and February, the World Health Organization recorded more than 60 attacks on healthcare across the West Bank, the vast majority in the northern area where Israel has focused its attack.
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