GENEVA, Jun 9: Palestinian civilians are caught between "mass atrocities" of Israeli forces, settlers and Hamas's brutal rule, a UN-mandated inquiry said Tuesday.
Civilians across war-ravaged Gaza and the occupied West Bank are being "systematically and deliberately" subjected to severe rights violations, the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry said.
The investigative team last year concluded that Israel had committed "genocide" in the war in Gaza -- a finding flatly rejected by Israel.
In a new report, the commission said civilians in the territory were also being "violently repressed and controlled by the very faction that claims to govern them".
In the Gaza Strip, "ordinary Palestinians find themselves trapped between the structural violence and mass atrocities of Israeli forces and the predatory, fear-based rule of Hamas", the report said.
And in the West Bank, which has seen soaring violence since Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war, it said Palestinian civilians were increasingly targeted by Israeli settler attacks.
"Violence by settlers is the direct outcome of Israeli policies that support, enable and protect their actions," commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar said in a statement.
Hamas-affiliated forces, he added, had meanwhile "exploited the vacuum created by relentless Israeli attacks and widespread destruction of Gaza".
"What is alarmingly similar is the deliberate infliction of suffering on Palestinian civilians. While their origins and motivations differ, both operate within environments engineered by Israel," said Muralidhar, an Indian judge.
Israel has long been harshly critical of the three-person commission, which was established by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 to probe rights violations in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Israel's mission in Geneva said the new report "seeks to create a false equivalence between Hamas terrorists and Israeli civilians", accusing the investigators of "spreading misinformation and manipulating reality to serve political agendas".
Tuesday's report focused heavily on the situation in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967.
In the territory, Israeli soldiers or settlers have killed at least 1,080 Palestinians since October 2023, according to an AFP tally based on Palestinian health ministry data.
The inquiry said that at least 26 Palestinians were killed and at least 1,570 were injured by settlers between January 2023 and December 2025.
"This trend continues in 2026 with attacks carried out on a daily basis," the investigators said.
They also said that, in addition to those killed on October 7, 2023, a total of 60 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians in the period 2023 to 2025, including 42 in the West Bank, of whom 36 were settlers. "AFP
