Rights group Amnesty International has accused Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank and making the Palestinian territory's formal annexation a policy goal.
"Over the past three and a half years, Israeli authorities have accelerated a state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, uprooting, dispossessing and forcibly transferring Palestinian communities," said Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnes Callamard in a statement issued Wednesday following the release of a report.
The human rights organization said the attacks were not the work of a few "bad apples."
"Settler violence is a core component of a state-sanctioned campaign of ethnic cleansing, central to maintaining Israel’s system of apartheid," it said.
A report by the U.N. human rights office had previously warned in March of war crimes being committed in the West Bank. The significantly expanded settler activities indicated coordinated actions and a policy of mass displacement, it said.
Amnesty International accused Israel of violently forcing Palestinians off their land, depriving them of their livelihoods and forcing them to flee. The attacks were "openly condoned and actively facilitated" by the Israeli government.
Callamard also criticized the international community as either being "complicit in or far too passive in the face of Israel’s repeated and gross violations of international law."
"It must clearly signal that the era of tacit acquiescence to Israel’s ethnic cleansing and annexation is over," Callamard said.
Israel captured the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in the 1967 Middle East war, and more than 700,000 Israeli settlers now live there among around 3 million Palestinians.
Palestinians seek the West Bank and East Jerusalem for a future state with East Jerusalem as its capital, a demand Israel disputes.
Israel differentiates between government-authorized settlements and unauthorized outposts that are sometimes later legalized, but the United Nations and most countries consider settlements in occupied territory illegal under international law.
The U.N. says settlement expansion undermines prospects for a two-state solution, a position Israel’s government rejects.
An independent U.N. inquiry reported Tuesday that Palestinian civilians across war-ravaged Gaza and the occupied West Bank are being "systematically and deliberately" subjected to severe rights violations and "mass atrocities" by Israeli forces and settlers.
The occupied West Bank has seen soaring violence since Israel launched in October 2023 a genocidal Gaza war, which was triggered by the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion.
