A new United Nations report examining the situation in the West Bank and Gaza has just been released, delivered to the UN Human Rights Council. The document draws together two separate strands of concern about the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. One focuses on settler violence in the West Bank, while the other turns a critical eye on the conduct of Hamas inside Gaza. Together, the findings add fresh weight to the debate over the dire circumstances facing Palestinians in both places.
On the West Bank, the report records that violence by settlers against Palestinians has been increasing. It is a problem that even Israeli authorities have themselves identified, although the public condemnation has tended to focus on the harm such violence does to the settler movement more broadly and to the wider security situation, rather than on the Palestinians targeted. The inquiry seeks to shift that focus back onto the victims and the scale of the harm.
The figures set out in the report are stark. It finds that between January 2008 and December 2025, 61 Palestinians were killed in acts of settler violence during that period. Over the same span, almost 3,800 Palestinians were injured. The report stresses that the frequency of these attacks is becoming more and more prevalent, pointing to a worsening trend rather than isolated incidents.
The inquiry also sets out what it sees as the factors driving the violence. It points to the promotion of settlement construction by the Israeli government, which it says gives settlers the sense that they can go and build communities that are considered illegal under international law. The report further criticises what it describes as a lack of response from Israeli police and the IDF, and notes that Israeli soldiers have at times taken part in or at least shielded settlers while they carried out acts of violence.
The second part of the report turns to Gaza and the executions reported there at the hands of groups such as Hamas. According to the inquiry, there were 249 separate cases between August 2024 and January 2026 of people being executed or seriously injured. Among those, the report records 108 deaths. The victims, it says, were people being targeted because they had committed some crimes, or were accused of being insubordinate or of collaborating with Israel against Hamas.
The report is heavily critical of Hamas over this conduct. It says the group is trying to enforce its own power and its own version of the rule of law in Gaza, in a way that is completely at odds with what international expectations would be. The inquiry argues that Hamas continues to use the cover of ongoing Israeli military attacks in Gaza as something of an excuse to carry out these executions and severe beatings, and it insists that such circumstances cannot be used as a justification.
Taken together, the two findings paint a grim picture of life for Palestinians under very different pressures in the two territories. In the West Bank, the report describes a pattern of settler attacks met by weak official response, while in Gaza it documents lethal internal repression carried out under the strain of war. By placing both within a single inquiry, the report underlines that accountability concerns run in more than one direction.
The release of the document is likely to intensify an already heated debate. By delivering detailed figures to the Human Rights Council, the inquiry puts numbers to allegations that have circulated for years, both about settler violence in the West Bank and about executions in Gaza. What action, if any, follows from the report now rests with the international bodies and governments that receive it.