A team of UN experts has issued a “stark warning about surging Israeli settler terror” in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem and “the existential risk it poses to Palestinian communities’ presence on the land”.
The group of 14, including the UN’s special rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, cited a sharp increase in the number of Palestinian casualties in settler attacks this year, saying at least 13 had been killed and close to 500 injured in five months amid the “settler brutality”.
The experts said in a statement:
Relentless attacks by the settler-colonial movement, carried out with the support and acquiescence of the Israeli State, have become a daily terror in Palestinian lives, sowing fear, uncertainty and profound insecurity that inevitably compels the forcible displacement of the indigenous population.
The escalating violence, carried out with full impunity, serves as an instrument of coercion in the hands of the occupying power, facilitating ethnic cleansing.”
The recent escalation of regional hostilities had drawn international attention away from the realities in the occupied territories, the UN team said, and the “displacement of people has slipped further from sight”.
