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

Local Palestinian landowners (L) gather in protest against land confiscations as Israeli forces and armed settlers guard an Israeli bulldozer reportedly operating on Palestinian lands near the village of Dura, west of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on June 9, 2026. (Photo by HAZEM BADER / AFP) 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”.

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“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”.

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