UN agency chief urges Israel to prevent ‘genocide’

GENEVA: The chief of United Nations rights agency demanded on Monday 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, the UN rights office said Israel’s actions in Gaza since the start of the conflict in October 2023 involved “gross violations” of international law, amounting in many cases to “war crimes and other atrocity crimes”.

Volker Turk, the chief of UN Human Rights Commission, 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.

Israel, he said, should ensure “with immediate effect that its military does not engage in acts of genocide, (and take) all measures to prevent and punish incitement to commit genocide”.

‘Unlawful killings’

Monday’s report, which covered the period from Oct 7, 2023, when Hamas’s unprecedented raid inside Israel sparked the Gaza conflict, up to May 2025, also condemned “serious violations” including some amounting to war crimes, by Palestinian armed groups during the initial attack and after.

Monday’s report highlighted the abuse suffered by the prisoners seized by the Palestinian armed groups.

“Most hostages who died in Gaza died while held in secret detention, either killed by their captors or impact of the conflict occurring around them,” it said.

Most of the focus however was on Israel’s actions in Gaza, where its retaliatory military campaign has killed more than 72,000 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN.

Hundreds of thousands of people are still living in tents and conditions remain dire despite a ceasefire that took effect in October last year.

“The ceasefire diminished the imme­nse scale of violence up to that point, and opened some modest humanitarian space,” Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN rights office in the occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters in Geneva.

“But killings and the destruction of infrastructure have continued on an almost daily basis, and the overall humanitarian situation remains dire,” he warned.

A large proportion of the killings since the start of the war “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.

The report also looked at the situation in the West Bank, where violence has spiralled since the start of the war in Gaza, pointing out that “the use of unnecessary and disproportionate force (there had) led to hundreds of unlawful killings”.

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2026

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