The United Nations does not use the phrase “ethnic cleansing” lightly. On Thursday, it used it anyway, according to Arab News.
In a damning new report covering a full year of conflict from November 2024 through October 2025, the UN human rights office concluded that Israel’s intensified military campaigns, its systematic destruction of Palestinian neighborhoods, and its suffocating blockade of Gaza have together created conditions “increasingly incompatible with Palestinians’ continued existence as a group.” The forcible displacement of civilians, the office warned, appears designed not as a temporary wartime measure, but as a permanent demographic shift.
That is not a bureaucratic concern. That is an accusation of ethnic cleansing.
The human cost embedded in this report is staggering. During those twelve months, at least 463 Palestinians, among them 157 children, starved to death in Gaza. The UN did not frame this as a tragic side effect of war. It said the famine was “the direct result of actions taken by the Israeli government,” and that the deaths were “foreseeable and repeatedly foretold.” Palestinians, the report stated, faced an unbearable choice; starve quietly, or risk being shot while searching for food.
In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the picture is equally grim. The UN documented the unlawful use of force by Israeli security forces, mass arbitrary detention, and the widespread demolition of Palestinian homes, all part of what it described as a deliberate effort to “discriminate, oppress, control and dominate” the Palestinian population and alter the territory’s demographic character.
The report did not absolve Hamas. It condemned the continued holding of hostages seized on October 7, 2023, dead or alive, as bargaining tools, calling their treatment war crimes. Both sides, it concluded, had committed serious violations of international humanitarian law.
But the report’s sharpest language was reserved for impunity itself. UN rights chief Volker Turk put it with rare bluntness: “Impunity is not abstract, it kills.”
With Israel’s far-right Finance Minister openly vowing to encourage Palestinian “emigration,” and senior UN officials warning of creeping annexation in the West Bank, the world is no longer watching a war. It is watching something being built in its place permanently, and in plain sight.
