UN Probe Accuses Israel of Extermination in West Bank and Continuing Genocide in Gaza
A United Nations-mandated investigation has accused Israeli authorities of committing extermination, torture, rape and persecution in the occupied West Bank—and of continuing genocidal acts in Gaza a year after a ceasefire reduced the scale of fighting.
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry released its findings Monday, October 26, one day before Israel’s national election. Its language leaves no room for the evasions that governments use to turn mass violence into a technical dispute. The commission says Israeli forces have waged a widespread and systematic attack on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank while preserving both the means and intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, at least in part.
The commission is independent and does not speak for the United Nations as an institution. The UN Human Rights Council created it in 2021 to gather evidence and identify responsibility. Its findings are not a court judgment, but prosecutors at the International Criminal Court and in national jurisdictions can use its documentation.
A ceasefire without an end to destruction
According to the commission, the October 2025 ceasefire did not stop Israel from “continuing to commit genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza.” Both the Associated Press and AFP reported that conclusion from the inquiry’s new report.
The commission says Israel expanded its military control of Gaza from 53 percent when the ceasefire began to at least 60 percent. Israeli fire killed at least 196 Palestinians during that period, including 18 women, 32 boys and 11 girls, according to the report.
That is the political fraud at the center of the ceasefire. The pace of bombardment fell, but territorial seizure continued. Palestinians remained confined inside a devastated enclave while the military advanced its lines and retained the power to kill across them. A truce that widens occupation does not end a war; it reorganizes it.
Gaza’s Health Ministry says Israel’s campaign has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. Hamas and other militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages that day. Those crimes do not erase the legal protections owed to every civilian who came afterward.
Extermination in the West Bank
The inquiry’s West Bank finding marks an escalation in legal gravity. It accuses Israeli authorities and forces of the crimes against humanity of extermination, torture, rape, other forms of sexual violence and persecution based on nationality, race and ethnicity.
The report documents allegations involving Palestinian detainees, including six cases of sexual violence against men held at the Sde Teiman military prison. The Associated Press said it could not independently corroborate several graphic accounts. That limitation matters; so does the commission’s mandate to collect testimony and preserve evidence for future prosecution.
The charge also reaches beyond detention centers. The commission describes military operations reinforced by sustained settler violence as a systematic assault on Palestinian civilians. That framework connects home seizures, forced displacement, checkpoints, raids and attacks by settlers—not as isolated abuses, but as parts of a political system.
Israel answers with denial
Israel rejects the genocide and sexual-violence allegations. Its mission in Geneva called the report part of a “misinformation campaign to demonize the State of Israel and portray its very existence as criminal,” language carried by both AP and The Times of Israel. The mission demanded that governments reject the findings and dissolve the commission.
That response attacks the investigator rather than answering the evidence. Israel has repeatedly treated international scrutiny as hostility, even as its own officials proclaim goals of permanent control, wider settlement and Palestinian displacement.
The timing matters. Israeli voters go to the polls Tuesday in an election dominated by security, Netanyahu’s record and the unresolved reckoning over October 7. Yet the Palestinians living under Israel’s military power do not get a vote. The state that controls their borders, movement, land and detention system decides its government without them.
The report therefore lands as more than another warning. It asks whether law applies when the accused state has powerful allies, and whether a ceasefire can become cover for continuing conquest. If the evidence never produces consequences, “never again” becomes a slogan reserved for some lives and withheld from others.
Photo source: Ralf Roletschek / Wikimedia Commons · GFDL 1.2 license. File photograph; not the October 2026 operation. Cropped and overlaid only on the V9 card.
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