Israel Has Committed Genocidal Acts in Gaza Since Cease-Fire, U.N. Human Rights Panel Says
"The panel also accuses Israel of committing crimes against humanity in the West Bank. Israel condemned the report.
A commission of United Nations human rights experts said on Monday that Israel was committing genocidal acts against Palestinian civilians in Gaza despite a cease-fire agreement there and carrying out crimes against humanity in the West Bank.
The report by the U.N. Independent Commission of Inquiry, which comes on the eve of Israel’s first general election since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, is meant to look at the drivers of violence by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the panel said. It said that Israel was deliberately targeting Palestinian children and was using torture, rape and sexual violence as part of a broader attack aimed at displacing and subjugating the Palestinian population.
Israel immediately rejected the claims.
The report, delivered to the U.N. General Assembly, noted that between the cease-fire announced on Oct. 10, 2025, and the end of September 2026, Israeli airstrikes, artillery and gunfire had killed 1,431 Palestinians in Gaza, including 300 children. The report rejected a claim in May by the Board of Peace set up by President Trump that the cease-fire had “largely held.”
The combined findings of the U.N. commission, an independent panel of three human rights experts that has already released multiple reports, represent the most authoritative legal analysis of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza pending a ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague on an allegation of genocide filed by South Africa.
“The intentional killing and injuring of Palestinian civilians and destruction of homes in the West Bank combined with Israel’s persistent denial of responsibility form part of a broader strategy to exterminate and displace Palestinians and impose conditions of life that are unlivable,” Srinivasan Muralidhar, an Indian lawyer who serves as the panel’s chairman, said in a statement accompanying the report.
The commission also includes Chris Sidoti, an Australian expert on international human rights law who has served on the panel since it was set up in 2021; and Florence Mumba, a Zambian judge who served on international criminal tribunals investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
The commission cited a series of Israeli airstrikes, artillery bombardments and sniper attacks in Gaza and said they “show that Israeli authorities and forces continue to commit genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza.”
Israel’s permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva called the report misinformation and an attempt to demonize Israel.
Daniel Meron, Israel’s ambassador in Geneva, condemned what it called “efforts by actors such as the U.N. Commission of Inquiry to undermine Israel’s legitimacy and deny its fundamental right to exist and defend itself.”
The U.N. panel first asserted that Israel committed genocide in the war in Gaza in September 2025, when the commission was led by Navi Pillay, who was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The new report said that Israel’s government and security forces had deliberately inflicted death, severe injury and mental harm on Palestinian children, amounting to “age-based persecution.”
It also said that since a report on sexual violence in March 2025, the commission had verified more cases against detainees from Gaza and the West Bank, including gang rape, groping, forced nudity and cavity searches. It also said the commission had investigated two cases of sexual violence against participants in a flotilla of about 50 boats that were apprehended in the Mediterranean Sea as they tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
The panel said Israeli forces were increasingly applying lethal force against Palestinians in the West Bank, killing 1,080 Palestinians since the cease-fire agreement.
The West Bank has experienced soaring levels of settler violence, but the commission said Israeli security forces were responsible for 95 percent of killings and 82 percent of injuries to Palestinians in this period.
The combination of Israeli military operations and settler violence “had formed part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population in the West Bank,” the panel said, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The targeting of children by security forces and settlers was deliberate and intended to form part of the attack on the civilian population, it said.
Israeli military operations since January 2025 had driven more than 34,000 Palestinians from their homes by August 2026, in what the commission said amounted to the largest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967, when Israel captured the territory from Jordan during the Arab-Israeli war that year.
The commission also said that the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, had used excessive force resulting in killings in the course of large-scale operations targeting Palestinians wanted by Israel and conducted in coordination with the Israeli authorities.
Over a period of about two years up to October 2025, such operations had resulted in the deaths of at least 14 Palestinians, the commission reported. The Palestinian Authority responded harshly to criticism of these operations, targeting journalists and human rights defenders in an attempt to silence dissent, it said.
Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations at Geneva, said in response: “We remain committed to ensuring that law enforcement respects the law and human rights, including freedom of expression and the work of journalists and human rights defenders. Any misconduct will be addressed.”"
