The United Nations said in a new report on Wednesday that Israel is violating international law by enacting a system akin to apartheid and warned that discriminatory practices have accelerated dramatically since late 2022 amid growing violence, repression and impunity in the occupied West Bank.
In the report, “Israel’s discriminatory administration of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem”, the UN high commissioner for human rights said decades-long “systematic discrimination” against Palestinians is intensifying, and called on the country to end its “apartheid system”.
In a statement, UN rights chief Volker Turk said, “There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank.”
The 42-page report covers unlawful killings of Palestinians; discriminatory restriction of movement; an increasing number of detentions of Palestinians and torture of detainees; settlement expansion and appropriation of Palestinian resources; a clampdown on freedom of expression; the demolition of homes; and the forcible transfers of Palestinians.
“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before,” Turk said.
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While many independent experts affiliated with the UN have described the situation in the occupied West Bank as “apartheid”, this is reportedly the first time a UN rights chief has used the term. It refers to the policy of racial segregation and discrimination that the white minority government in South Africa used against the country’s majority non-white population from 1948 until the early 1990s.
The report says the Israeli authorities “treat Israeli settlers and Palestinians residing in the West Bank under two distinct bodies of law and policies”.
“Palestinians continue to be subjected to large-scale confiscation of land and deprivation of access to resources,” it says.
The report says Palestinians are prosecuted in military courts where due process and fair trial rights are “systematically violated” while Israeli settlers “benefit” from the system, enjoying the same rights that Israelis within Israel enjoy, the report argues.
Turk demanded that Israel “repeal all laws, policies and practices that perpetuate systemic discrimination against Palestinians based on race, religion or ethnic origin”.
The Israeli mission in Geneva dismissed the report as “absurd and distorted” and said it exemplified the UN rights office’s “inherently politically driven fixation … on vilifying Israel”.
Killing of Palestinians
The report notes that the Israeli government had “further expanded” unlawful use of force, arbitrary detention and torture, repression of civil society and undue restrictions on media freedoms, severe movement restrictions, settlement expansion and related violations in the occupied West Bank after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the susequent war on Gaza, which has been recognised as a genocide by the UN, human rights groups and genocide scholars.
The UN also documented “a continuation and escalation of [Israeli] settler violence, in many cases with the acquiescence, support and participation of Israeli security forces (ISF)”.
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The report says that between 2005 and 20 September 2025, the Israeli military had killed 2,321 Palestinians (1,760 men, 65 women, and 496 children) in the occupied West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, and injured thousands more, in many instances causing life-long injuries and disabilities.
Meanwhile, during the same period, 205 Israelis (148 men, 32 women, and 25 children) were killed. More than a third of them, 69, were members of the Israeli military, and they occurred during tensions or following attacks by lone Palestinians.
Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza alone, Israeli troops and settlers have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank – a sharp increase.
The UN also documented an increase in extrajudicial killings by the Israeli military with “almost complete impunity” in the West Bank. Out of more than 1,500 killings of Palestinians recorded between January 2017 and last September, Israeli authorities opened just 112 investigations, resulting in only one conviction, the report said.
The report also made mention of gratuitous killings using lethal force. In November 2023, soldiers in an armoured convoy stopped to shoot eight-year-old Adam Samer Othman al-Ghoul in the back of the head as he was running away; and Basil Suleiman Tawfiq Abu al-Wafa, 15, twice in the chest while he was trying to light a small unidentified device, which the report said “would have posed no threat to an armoured vehicle”.
The soldiers did not provide the boys with medical assistance, leaving them unattended as they died.
Around 3.3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, and approximately 700,00 Israeli settlers are living there in settlements that are illegal under international law.
Restriction of movement
Since Israel’s war on Gaza began, Israeli authorities “extended and intensified existing restrictions” on the movement of Palestinians across the occupied territories.
The UN said the restrictions appeared “to unlawfully pursue two main aims: further fragmenting Palestinian territory and society for easier control by the Israeli army and creating and expanding areas for ISF and settlers’ access only, including roads, to guarantee ‘security’ for settlers”.
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Discriminatory movement restrictions had a detrimental impact on the economic, social and cultural rights of Palestinians, infringing on their right to work and preventing access to their lands – causing major financial hardship and impeding their right to an adequate standard of living.
The International Labour Organisation found that measures imposed by Israeli authorities had caused a loss of 306,000 jobs in the occupied West Bank as of 31 January 2024. Unemployment rates in the West Bank stood at 31.7 percent for men and 33.7 percent for women by the first quarter of 2025.
According to the Global Education Cluster, increased movement restrictions, Israeli military operations and settler violence caused an 85 percent reduction of traffic across the occupied West Bank, affecting at least 782,000 students from October 2023 to August 2024, and causing the cancellation of classes and reliance on remote learning, which is not accessible to all.
The closure of 12 UN schools in occupied East Jerusalem and in refugee camps in the northern West Bank impacted 6,630 Palestinian students.
Women and girls were disproportionately affected, as families stopped sending girls to school, especially during periods of intensified violence, as they feared gender-based violence and humiliation during extensive searches at checkpoints.
Detention
The UN also notes that Israeli authorities used arbitrary detention as an acute means of control over the Palestinian population.
It found that Israeli authorities deliberately subjected Palestinians to inhumane conditions of detention, ill-treatment and torture, including extensive sexual and gender-based violence against men and women, such as rape and threats of rape; beating on genitals and other sexualized torture; repeated, unnecessary and humiliating strip searches; forced nudity; and inappropriate touching.
The report cites a case of two male detainees released at the end of September who reported to the UN that they, along with other inmates, were subjected to anal rape with an object.
The report concluded it had found “reasonable grounds to believe that this separation, segregation, and subordination is intended to be permanent… to maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians”.
The UN rights office urged Israel to end its “unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including by dismantling all settlements and evacuating all settlers, and to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.
