Palestinians ‘trapped’ between Israeli forces, settlers and Hamas: UN probe

GENEVA – Palestinian civilians are caught between “mass atrocities” of Israeli forces, settlers and Hamas’s brutal rule, a UN-mandated inquiry said on June 9.

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, which in 2025 concluded that Israel had committed “genocide” in the war in Gaza, highlighted in a new report that 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 described how 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.

The three-person commission was established by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 to investigate alleged rights violations in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The June 9 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.

Official Israeli figures show that at least 46 Israelis, both civilians and soldiers, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military operations in the same period.

The inquiry found 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.

The report, which will be presented to the rights council on June 15, concluded that Israel was responsible for enabling the settlers’ action.

Settler violence “functions as a means of implementing Israeli state policy”, it charged, with both focused on “entrenchment of Israeli settlements, annexation of Palestinian territory and displacement of Palestinians from their land”.

The report called on Israel, which has long accused the commission of “systematic anti-Israel discrimination”, to stop the violence.

Israel, it said, must “immediately end the unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory”, stop all new settlement activities and remove all settlers and settlements.

The commission also determined that Hamas-affiliated forces were responsible for serious rights abuses, including the “war crimes of murder and torture” in Gaza.

It identified 249 cases of executions and severe physical violence in 2024-2025, resulting in at least 108 deaths and 384 people injured.

The commission found that Hamas-affiliated forces were involved in at least 60 such incidents.

The investigators found among other things that Hamas members had “tortured Palestinian civilians in the Nasser Medical Complex” in Gaza.

It stressed though that such conduct “does not result in the loss of special protection of the hospital against attacks under international humanitarian law”.

The commission recommended “that the de facto authorities in Gaza immediately stop all extrajudicial punishments of civilians, including executions, torture, and mental, physical and sexual violence”.

They should also “refrain from using civilian objects, including hospitals, for any purpose incompatible with their humanitarian and civilian functions”, it added. AFP