The UN warned Tuesday that mass displacement in the West Bank had hit levels not seen since the start of Israel’s military control of the Palestinian territory nearly 60 years ago.
The United Nations said an Israeli military operation launched in the north of the territory in January had displaced tens of thousands of people.
The military operation “has been the longest since … the Second Intifada,” in the early 2000s, said Juliette Touma, spokeswoman for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
“It is impacting several refugee camps in the area, and it is causing the largest population displacement of the Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967,” she told reporters in Geneva via video from Jordan, referring to the Six Day War, in which Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan.
The UN rights office warned that mass forced displacement by an occupation force could amount to “ethnic cleansing.”
Since Israel’s military launched its operation “Iron Wall” in the north of the West Bank in January, rights office spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan said, “about 30,000 Palestinians remain forcibly displaced.”
Most of the Palestinian civilians in the Jenin refugee camp, the area at the center of the campaign, have evacuated, allowing Israeli troops to search and clear each individual building of infrastructure and weapons used by local terror groups.
Israeli security forces during the same period issued demolition orders for about 1,400 homes in the northern West Bank, he said, describing the figures as “alarming.”
Kheetan pointed out that Israeli demolitions had displaced 2,907 Palestinians across the West Bank since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack, which sparked the ongoing war in Gaza.
Since then, troops have arrested some 6,000 wanted Palestinians across the West Bank, including more than 2,350 affiliated with Hamas.
According to the Palestinian Authority health ministry, more than 950 West Bank Palestinians have been killed in that time. The IDF says the vast majority of them were gunmen killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops, or terrorists carrying out attacks.
During the same period, 53 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another eight members of Israeli security forces have been killed in fighting during anti-terror raids in Nablus, Jenin, and elsewhere in the West Bank.
Another 2,400 Palestinians — nearly half of them children — had been displaced as a result of Israeli settler actions, Kheetan added, lamenting that the combined result was the “emptying large parts of the West Bank of Palestinians.”
“Permanently displacing the civilian population within occupied territory amounts to unlawful transfer,” he said, stressing that depending on the circumstances, it could be “tantamount to ethnic cleansing” and could “amount to a crime against humanity.”
Kheetan said 757 attacks by Israeli settlers had been recorded in the West Bank during the first half of the year, a 13 percent increase on the same period in 2024.
The attacks injured 96 Palestinians in the territory in June alone, he told reporters, stressing that it was the highest monthly injury toll of Palestinians from settler attacks “in over two decades.”