The United Nations on Wednesday said decades of discrimination and segregation of Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank were intensifying, and called on the country to end its “apartheid system.”
In a new report, the UN rights office said the “systematic discrimination” against Palestinians had “drastically deteriorated” in recent years.
“There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement.
“Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives –- every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices,” he alleged.
“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before.”
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A number of independent experts affiliated with the UN have described the situation in the Palestinian territories as an “apartheid” but this marks the first time a UN rights chief has applied the term.
Israel’s mission the United Nations dismissed the report as “absurd and distorted accusations of racial discrimination.”
In said the report “completely ignores fundamental facts that lie at the basis of the conflict, and that inform the actions and policies of the State of Israel, mainly the grave security threats that Israel faces” and well as that the PA continues “to encourage violence” by paying stipends to terrorist who attack Israelis or their families.
It said the UN human rights office has an “inherently political driven fixation…on vilifying Israel” and questioned if the office had “demonstrated comparable attention through unmandated thematic reporting on situations such as Iran, Syria, Yemen, or Sudan.”
Israel rejects any allegation of apartheid, saying its own Arab citizens enjoy equal rights. Israel also notes that it granted limited autonomy to the Palestinian Authority at the height of the peace process in the 1990s, giving it control over areas of the West Bank where the majority of Palestinians in the territory live.
Illustrative: IDF troops during a military operation in the West Bank, December 31, 2025. (Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90)
Mounting settler violence
Wednesday’s report said the Israeli authorities “treat Israeli settlers and Palestinians residing in the West Bank under two distinct bodies of law and policies, resulting in unequal treatment on a range of critical issues.”
“Palestinians continue to be subjected to large-scale confiscation of land and deprivation of access to resources,” it added.
This had led to “dispossessing them of their lands and homes, alongside other forms of systemic discrimination, including criminal prosecution in military courts during which their due process and fair trial rights are systematically violated.”
Turk demanded Wednesday that Israel “repeal all laws, policies and practices that perpetuate systemic discrimination against Palestinians based on race, religion or ethnic origin.”
The discrimination was compounded by continuing and escalating settler violence, in many cases “with the acquiescence, support and participation of Israel’s security forces,” the rights office said.
More than 500,000 Israelis currently live in settlements in the West Bank, controlled by Israel since 1967 and home to around three million Palestinians.
Settlers and Palestinians face off near Bethlehem, November 29, 2025. At center, a settler can be seen wielding his gun toward a Palestinian. (Screenshot, used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)
Violence in the West Bank has soared since the Hamas attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war in October 2023.
More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or settlers since the war started, according to the PA health ministry. The IDF says the vast majority of them were gunmen killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or terrorists carrying out attacks.
During the same period, at least 65 civilians and Israeli security personnel have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another eight members of the security forces were killed in clashes during raids in Palestinian cities in the West Bank.
The same period has also seen a major surge in attacks by settler extremists on Palestinians and their property across the West Bank. The IDF has recorded more than 750 incidents of nationalistic crime and settler violence since the start of 2025. The total for 2024 was 675 incidents.
‘Almost complete impunity’
Since the Gaza war began, Israeli authorities had also “further expanded the use of unlawful force, arbitrary detention and torture,” the UN report said.
Increased “repression of civil society and undue restrictions on media freedoms (and) severe movement restrictions” had also characterized “an unprecedented deterioration of the human rights situation” in the West Bank, it said.
There had also been rapid expansions of settlements, considered illegal under international law, even as unlawful killings of Palestinians were taking place “with almost complete impunity,” the report charged.
Children stand next to a vehicle that was torched during a settler rampage in the early morning in the West Bank town of Ein Yabrud, December 17, 2025. (AP/Nasser Nasser)
Of the more than 1,500 killings of Palestinians that took place between the start of 2017 and September 30 last year, Israeli authorities had opened just 112 investigations, resulting in only one conviction, it pointed out.
Thousands of Palestinians meanwhile remain arbitrarily detained by Israeli authorities, mostly under so-called “administrative detention,” without charge or trial, it said.
The report said it had found “reasonable grounds to believe that this separation, segregation, and subordination is intended to be permanent… to maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians.”
This, it stressed, amounts to a violation of an international anti-racism convention, “which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid.”
The UN rights office on Wednesday urged Israel to end its “unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including by dismantling all settlements and evacuating all settlers, and to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”
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