UNRWA Commissioner‑General Philippe Lazzarini said on Sunday that Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank has reached “record levels.”
In a statement, Lazzarini described the situation as “Israel’s silent war—one that has not received the attention it deserves.”
He noted that “record levels of violence have been documented in the occupied West Bank since October 2023, with more than 1,000 Palestinians killed—nearly a quarter of them children.”
Since the start of the genocide in Gaza on October 7, 2023, Israel—through its army and illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizers—has intensified its actions across the West Bank, including killings, home demolitions, forced displacement, and colonial expansion.
Over the past two years, this escalation has resulted in the killing of 1,110 Palestinians, the injury of nearly 11,500 others in the West Bank, and the abduction of more than 21,000.
Lazzarini said attacks by Israeli colonizers continue unabated, while Palestinian communities face constant intimidation, uprooting from their lands, and the destruction of their livelihoods, all under a system of near‑total impunity.
He added that around 770,000 Israeli colonizers now live in hundreds of colonies and colonial outposts across the occupied West Bank, including 250,000 in East Jerusalem, carrying out daily assaults aimed at forcibly displacing Palestinians.
Lazzarini also noted that “tens of thousands of Palestinians remain displaced a year after Israel launched its ‘Iron Wall’ operation—the largest displacement since 1967—and their homes are now being gradually demolished to prevent their return.”
He warned that “as global attention has focused on Gaza, the blatant disregard for international humanitarian law in the West Bank has become normalized.”
