The United Nations has demanded that Israel take measures to prevent acts of "genocide" in Gaza, and decried indications of "ethnic cleansing" in the Palestinian territory and in the occupied West Bank.
In a fresh report on Monday, the UN rights office said Israel's actions in Gaza since the start of the war in October 2023 involved "gross violations" of international law, amounting in many cases to "war crimes and other atrocity crimes".
UN rights chief Volker Turk called in the report on Israel to ensure compliance with a 2024 International Court of Justice order that it take measures to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza.
'Collective punishment'
Israel’s brutal genocide has killed more than 72,000 people, according to the health ministry in the besieged Palestinian enclave, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN.
A large proportion of those killings "appear unlawful", the report said.
It also highlighted how Israel had "directed attacks on civilian or protected objects, including healthcare and medical facilities and attacks on civilians, including journalists, civil defenders, health workers, humanitarian actors and police in a routine and repeated fashion".
Israel's conduct in Gaza had rendered living conditions in much of the territory "incompatible with Palestinians’ continued existence as a group", it warned.
It also said "the use of unnecessary and disproportionate force in the West Bank led to hundreds of unlawful killings".
"In both Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli military and other security forces have forced displacement on a mass scale."
The report charged that "the deliberate and unlawful destruction of wide swathes of Gaza", coupled with "the emptying and destruction of large parts of refugee camps in northern West Bank", had contributed to forcing Palestinians from their homes, "with strong indications that Israel intends their displacement to be permanent".
Taken together, Israel's repeated violations across the occupied Palestinian territories indicated a pattern aimed at doling out "collective punishment of Palestinians", and "forced displacement, emptying and ethnic cleansing of large parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory", said the report.
"Incitement and derogatory and dehumanising language targeted at Palestinians as a group from Israeli officials was also observed with no accountability," it warned.
The rights office stressed that it was "essential that there is due reckoning" for all violations listed in the report "through "credible and impartial judicial bodies"
"In the meantime, all relevant evidence (must be) collected, preserved and investigated," it said.
