NEW YORK CITY: Two systems of violence — one entrenched in the occupied West Bank and enabled by the Israeli state, the other born of Gaza’s ruin and enforced by Hamas — are closing in on the same population from opposite directions, the chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory told Arab News.
“They are trapped,” said Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, a former chief justice of India’s Orissa High Court who took over as chair of the three-member commission in November. “Trapped from both ends. The borders are all sealed, you have security forces all around you, and then you have to deal with the Palestinian armed groups themselves.”
That image runs through the commission’s latest report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, which found settler attacks in the West Bank rose by 130 percent in a single year, while in Gaza, Hamas-affiliated forces carried out hundreds of executions, beatings, and mutilations against the population they claim to govern.
Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, the chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. (UN photo)
“They are sandwiched between two groups which do not believe in any rule of law, in any form of justice,” Muralidhar said. “There are no norms. It is like you are breaking up a population completely and watching them slowly die.”
Asked what the 130 percent rise in settler attacks means on the ground, Muralidhar said Gaza and the West Bank are living through conditions designed to be unsurvivable. “These families are now under perpetual fear of attacks at any time, because Israel has consistently and persistently violated the ceasefire,” he said.
“They are subjected to attacks from the air, tanks, and are forced to flee their homes at very short notice.”
He pointed to a “systematic destruction of the entire infrastructure in Gaza” — electricity, water, sanitation cut off — making “any form of decent living simply impossible,” and pushing families south into encampments in “extremely insanitary conditions.”
“This is the time for the entire world to sit up, to take notice,” he said.
Civil defense forces and volunteers attempt to extinguish a fire in a field in the Palestinian town of Huwara in the occupied West Bank on June 6, 2026, after a reported arson attack by Israeli settlers according to local officials. (AFP/File photo)
In the West Bank, investigators found settler violence is not the work of rogue individuals but a deliberate extension of state policy, Muralidhar said.
Reading from the commission’s findings, he added: “The period since 2023 has been characterized by a significant rise in large-scale organized attacks against Palestinian villages and agricultural land involving groups of masked attackers, many of them armed and accompanied by Israeli security forces.”
Settlers wage “daily campaigns of harassment, trespassing on the land and property, and intimidation,” with outposts strategically established “to expand territorial control.”
Between Oct. 7, 2023, and March 10, 2026, about 59 shepherding communities were expelled, primarily due to settler violence — the largest “located in the southern Hebron Hills, with attacks reportedly originating from the Meitarim Farm outpost, with attackers often accompanied by soldiers,” a reference to Khirbet Zanuta.
“The settlers are being armed by the Israeli security forces, accompanied by the Israeli security forces,” he said. “No action is being taken whatsoever to book any cases against the settlers. On the other hand, the settlers are encouraged to go and attack the unarmed, defenseless Palestinians.”
A new make shift gate blocks the entrance to the Bedouin village of Khirbet Zanuta in the occupied West Bank on June 2, 2025, that was abandoned following attacks by Israeli settlers. (AFP/File photo)
Among the most disturbing findings, Muralidhar said, is the targeting of children — as victims, and increasingly as perpetrators.
On April 19, 2025: “Two siblings, a 12-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy, were abducted by settlers while playing outside their home in Beit Furik. The settlers dragged the children at knifepoint to an olive grove, covering their mouths, and tied them to a tree with plastic hand ties,” before the family found and freed them.
In August 2024, two 15-year-old boys herding livestock were abducted and abused, “including forced stripping and being urinated upon.”
On Jan. 25, 2026, settlers in an all-terrain vehicle chased a school bus near Jericho. “Adult settlers threw stones at the vehicle that tried to flee while the children were screaming and crying inside.”
More troubling still is that Israeli children, some as young as 12, are being pulled out of school and deployed by settlers to commit violence.
“I think this is a systematic attempt at brainwashing the young population of Israel,” Muralidhar said. “There is a hate being instilled into the young Israeli minds, which is making them actually target other children — younger than them, older than them.”
Asked why the pattern has only worsened, Muralidhar pointed to the world’s inaction.
“We are not finding any concrete action being taken by the world community, despite clear evidence of violation of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and the breach of ceasefire agreements.
Israeli soldiers stand by as Palestinian medics assist a man who was reportedly attacked with pepper spray by Jewish settlers while he worked on his farmland near the Palestinian village of Halhoul, south of the Israel-occupied West Bank city of Hebron, on April 17, 2026. (AFP/File photo)
“The time for outrage and anguish is long past. We can’t simply wring our hands in despair and watch while Israel continues its systematic and deliberate targeting of Palestinians,” he said.
The report also documents sexual violence used by settlers to force Palestinian families off their land — targeting women, including those that are pregnant, the elderly, and people with disabilities.
On Oct. 19, 2025, in Turmus Ayya, outside Ramallah, settlers “attacked Palestinian farmers ... beat them with sticks and stones and set vehicles on fire. One of the farmers, a Palestinian woman in her 50s, was violently beaten with a club until she became unconscious.”
Soldiers had been present beforehand, fired tear gas at the crowd, and detained three human rights defenders who had come to offer protective accompaniment.
“Assistance was requested from the army but not provided.”
In Khirbet Humsa, on March 13, 2026, settlers beat women and girls and “threatened them with rape if the family did not leave the land. One man was stripped, sexually assaulted, his genitals zip-tied, and he was dragged and paraded while being beaten.”
Israeli police told the commission seven people were arrested, “but the commission is not aware of any investigative or judicial outcomes.”
Owais Hammam, an 18-year-old Palestinian man from the village of Khirbet Bani Harith near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank sits on a hospital bed at the Palestine Medical complex after he was allegedly kidnapped and assaulted by Israeli settlers on December 7, 2025. (AFP/File photo)
The commission also documented attempted rapes of Palestinian men in 2023 and 2025. “This is again a consistent pattern: subjecting men, even pregnant women, to rape and sexual assault,” he said.
Turning to Gaza, Muralidhar traced Hamas’ internal repression to the collapse of law and order under relentless Israeli assault — without excusing it.
“We trace it all to the origin of the conflict and the extreme forms of violence used against the Palestinian people by the Israeli security forces,” he said. “This has led to a breakdown of law and order ... Hamas (has taken) the law into its own hands.”
The figures: 249 cases of executions and severe physical violence between August 2024 and January 2026, resulting in at least 108 deaths and 384 injuries.
These cases involved “executions, kneecapping, bone-breaking with metal pipes or cement bricks, and beatings, framed as punishment for alleged collaboration with Israel, looting humanitarian aid, theft, or affiliations with internal rivals.”
Victims’ identities were often published online — doxing — “exposing victims and their families to further violence, stigma, and social exclusion,” he said.
A Palestinian man Yahya Dalal, 32, inspects scrap cars burnt in an attack by Israeli settlers, in Huwara in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, November 21, 2025. (AFP/File photo)
He named two forces: the Sahm Unit, “a plainclothes paramilitary force created in March 2024 by the Ministry of Interior in Gaza,” and the Rad’a Force, established in June 2025, with groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad at times joining in.
The commission traces such punitive violence back to the 2007 Hamas-Fatah power struggle. “Disturbingly, the crowds that gather to watch these public punishments include children,” he said.
“You are hardening children to violence from both ends — and there is not only physical violence, but mental trauma.”
Asked whether children who witness this violence go on to carry out violent acts themselves, Muralidhar said investigators had found no concrete examples yet — a gap tied to the commission’s greatest obstacle.
“The commission is not permitted to enter any of these territories — the occupied Palestinian territory, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and even Israel — so we rely entirely on firsthand accounts from witnesses in other locations, whether Jordan or Egypt, or medical practitioners who treated the injured,” he said.
Israeli army soldiers stand behind a masked man swinging a slingshot while hurling stones at Palestinians who had gathered for the annual olive harvest season, during an attack by Israeli settlers on the Palestinian village of Beita, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, on October 10, 2025. (AFP/File photo)
“It would make so much of a difference if we could visit the areas and speak to victims — not just Palestinians, but Israeli citizens, too.”
He highlighted the commission’s even-handed approach. “We are working only to uncover the truth and seek justice for all victims.”
Israel continues to deny access, he said.
“We keep repeatedly writing to the Israeli authorities to permit us to visit the areas, to see the evidence they say they have gathered.
“We are open ... to even correcting ourselves. But they have prevented Israeli victims of Oct. 7 from speaking to the commission, and prevented doctors treating victims from talking to us. There is large-scale non-cooperation ... hampering our functioning.”
Muralidhar said the Palestinian population now “are helpless, and are actually trapped — that is the right word to use.
“They can suddenly be called a collaborator with the Israeli forces and subjected to humiliation, punishment and extreme forms of violence. They are sandwiched between two groups which do not believe in any rule of law.”
He recounted testimony from doctors treating traumatized Palestinian children.
and razor wire recently erected by Israeli settlers to block the local shortcut route used to reach their school, forcing them to take a detour along the main road from their village of Umm al-Khair south of the town of Yatta, in the southern area of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank on April 14, 2026. (AFP/File photo)
“Children are benumbed. They no longer are able to scream because they are traumatized. Some of the doctors used the word ‘muting’ of an entire population. It is very tragic that the entire world community is watching while all of this is unfolding in front of our eyes.”
On Israeli hostages and attacks on Israeli civilians, Muralidhar pointed to the commission’s earlier, dedicated report on Oct. 7, 2023. “We specifically mentioned the treatment that Israeli children, Israeli women, were subjected to at the hands of the Palestinian armed groups and Hamas,” he said. “We found horrific instances, detailed in our report released soon after.”
The commission’s findings go beyond war crimes, Muralidhar said. “It is not just war crimes, it is crimes against humanity and genocide. Our conference room paper, released in September 2025, details those instances ... it attracts all the provisions of the Rome Statute.”
He pointed to mechanisms already in motion: International Criminal Court warrants, and three International Court of Justice provisional orders, petitioned by South Africa, that “Israel is violating with complete impunity.”
States party to the relevant conventions have a legal obligation to act, he said, “by exercising universal jurisdiction, or jurisdiction where international human rights law has been made part of domestic law,” noting that individuals implicated, including soldiers with dual citizenship, have been named in the commission’s documentation.
“The commission is willing to share that evidence with state parties pursuing legal proceedings. So there is much that the international community can do.”
