TEHRAN — Israel has kept committing genocide in Gaza since the U.S.-backed “ceasefire” took hold last October, and across the occupied West Bank it has committed crimes against humanity that include extermination, torture, rape and the systematic persecution of Palestinians.
That is the finding of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, in a report published on Monday, October 27.
The report covers October 7, 2023, through September 30, 2026. It appeared one day before Israel’s general election, and three days after Netanyahu ordered al-Khalil (Hebron) sealed. Reacting to the report, Israel’s mission in Geneva demanded the commission’s dissolution.
A ‘truce’ that has changed little on the ground
The commission says Israel is “continuing to commit genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The report says that the “ceasefire” lowered the volume of the war without ending it, and the Israeli military used the lull to advance. When the deal was signed, Israeli forces controlled 53 percent of the Strip. They now hold at least 60 percent.
Those seven points came with a grim body count. Fire along the advancing front has killed at least 196 Palestinians, among them 18 women, 32 boys and 11 girls.
Commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar said the expansion continues to kill and injure civilians who approach or cross the so-called Yellow Line.
In May, Israeli vehicles shoved its concrete markers dozens of meters west. On Monday, medical officials reported at least five more killed in air strikes, including a seven-year-old girl.
Gaza Health Ministry’s overall toll now exceeds 74,500, and nearly everyone in the territory has been displaced.
In September 2025, the commission found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, and in June it concluded that Israeli forces were deliberately targeting Palestinian children.
The West Bank under a widening assault
In the West Bank, the commission describes military operations, reinforced by sustained settler violence, as a “widespread and systematic attack” on civilians, meant to collectively punish residents for October 7.
Its legal conclusion names extermination, torture, rape and other sexual violence, plus persecution based on nationality, race and ethnicity “at its core.”
The air war is the clearest measure. From 2008 to October 6, 2023, six Palestinians died in air attacks in the West Bank. Between October 7, 2023, and September 30 this year, 254 died.
That works out to about 85 a year against fewer than one. Muralidhar tied the killings and the demolition of homes, together with Israel’s refusal to accept responsibility, to a broader strategy to exterminate and displace Palestinians and “impose conditions of life that are unlivable.”
Rape and torture in custody
The report also documents sexual violence in detention. The commission says it recently recorded six cases in which guards at the Sde Teiman military prison abused male detainees from Gaza.
In one, a detainee was raped with a stick. In another, guards tied a plastic cord around a man’s genitals and ordered him to urinate.
Women describe invasive strip searches, including of a pregnant detainee, and denial of sanitary pads.
Al-Khalil and the ministers
Al-Khalil (Hebron) is where it is playing out now. Netanyahu ordered the city sealed on Friday after a shooting nearby and told security forces to prepare a lockdown of the whole West Bank.
UN human rights chief Volker Türk said Monday that more than 2,000 Palestinians have already been forced from their homes, houses have been demolished, and residents are confined to their neighborhoods.
Threats to empty and erase neighborhoods, he said, raise “serious concerns of ethnic cleansing.” He called the measures punitive and said that “collective punishment is a grave violation of international law.”
Israeli ministers speak openly about where this leads. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Ynet last month that Israel should “go to war” in the West Bank and repeat what it did in Gaza.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, backing the closure, said soldiers’ and settlers’ lives were “a million times more important than freedom of movement.”
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