A commission finding genocide continued past the truce
A panel of independent experts convened by the United Nations has concluded that Israel carried on committing genocide in Gaza even after the truce struck last October. The same inquiry found that Israeli forces perpetrated war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territory, citing extermination, persecution, torture, rape and other sexual violence among the acts documented.[S1][S2][S3][S4][S5][S6]
The report was published one day before Israel's general election. It said Israeli forces had targeted Palestinians in Gaza and that conditions in the West Bank had worsened sharply since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. The release coincided with a large Israeli military operation in Hebron, which municipal authorities say has displaced more than 3,000 people; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered it after Palestinian gunmen killed two soldiers on Friday, local time.[S1]
In a report published a month before the US-brokered truce, the commission had already levelled a genocide accusation over Gaza last September, when Navi Pillay, the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize winner, chaired the panel. Israel rejected that document as false and distorted, and it has repeatedly denied committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. A further report in June accused Israel of intentionally targeting and killing Palestinian children in Gaza; Israel called it full of mistakes and misrepresentations.[S1]
West Bank findings: air strikes, displacement and sexual violence
While the report's main focus was Israeli conduct from October 2023 onward, it additionally determined that persistent settler attacks in the West Bank were part of what it described as a broad, systemic assault on Palestinians. Between the October 7, 2023 attacks and the close of September this year, airstrikes killed 254 Palestinians in the West Bank, the panel recorded, compared with six such deaths between 2008 and October 7.[S1][S7][S8]
According to the commission, sexual violence was employed as a means of displacing Palestinians, and Israeli forces were accused of intentionally killing and wounding children in the West Bank. Since January last year, military operations there have driven the biggest displacement of Palestinians since 1967, with over 34,000 people uprooted by August, the report states.[S1]
Commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar characterised Israel's conduct in the West Bank as serving a wider plan to displace and exterminate Palestinians while making the area unliveable. He further argued that Israel's disproportionate and discriminatory lethal force against Palestinians across generations stems from its colonising policies, and that casting Palestinian statehood as a threat to Israel's survival forecloses any workable route to self-determination.[S1]
Gaza after the ceasefire and the Yellow Line
Regarding Gaza, the report determined that Israeli authorities went on carrying out genocidal acts aimed at destroying Palestinians there, wholly or partly, following the commission's initial genocide finding in September 2025. It attributed much of the death and harm directly to Israel's expansion across the territory.[S1][S2][S3][S4][S5][S6]
At the time the October 2025 ceasefire took effect, the Israel Defense Forces controlled about 51 per cent of Gaza, bounded by the so-called Yellow Line. The commission found that this line had evolved from a temporary truce marker into a de facto border that kept creeping forward, with Israeli-held territory expanding to no less than 60 per cent of the strip. Between the truce's signing and early April, at least 196 Palestinians, including 43 children, were killed near the Yellow Line.[S1]
During the truce, the panel found, Israeli forces continued deploying heavy munitions, drones, quadcopters, artillery and snipers in crowded areas. It also criticised the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, finding that its targeting of dissenters, among them journalists and human rights defenders, had resulted in deaths. Muralidhar said the authority had failed to properly investigate those killings despite rising unnecessary and disproportionate force since the October 7 attacks. The Palestinian Authority had not commented by publication.[S1]
Israel's rejection and the wider toll
Israel's foreign ministry described the report as propaganda divorced from reality, saying it sought to delegitimise the Jewish state and to legitimise jihadist terrorism against its people. Its Geneva mission said the document formed part of a disinformation effort to demonise Israel. Ambassador Daniel Meron said in a statement that efforts to destroy the Jewish state persist through bodies like the commission seeking to erode Israel's legitimacy and deny its right to exist and defend itself.[S1]
The Gaza war was triggered by the Hamas-led attacks on Israel in 2023, in which militants killed 1,200 people and seized 251 hostages. According to the territory's health ministry, Israel's ensuing campaign has killed over 74,000 Palestinians and uprooted almost the entire population of Gaza.[S1]
