“Palestinian civilians are victims of all sides, trapped between the mass atrocities of Israeli forces and settlers and the fear-based rule of Hamas,” the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including east Jerusalem) and Israel said in a new report on Wednesday.
The report found that Israel is primarily responsible for the actions of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, while Hamas-affiliated forces are responsible for acts committed by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.
In fact, it claimed that Israeli authorities are directly involved in settler attacks on Palestinians by allegedly granting impunity for settler violence for decades.
The Commission wrote that settler violence in the West Bank functions as a “means of implementing Israeli State policy,” including the “maintenance of the unlawful occupation, the entrenchment of illegal Israeli settlements, the annexation of Palestinian territory, and the displacement of Palestinians from their land.”
The UN also accused settlers of assaulting, abducting, and abusing Palestinian children while they were engaged in activities such as playing, going to school, or tending to animals and fields.
It also repeated previous claims of settlers committing or threatening to commit sexual violence against Palestinians to instill fear and humiliation, claims which Israel vehemently denies.
Settler violence a 'direct outcome' of Israeli policy, commission chair says
“Violence by settlers is the direct outcome of Israeli policies that support, enable, and protect their actions, whereas Hamas-affiliated forces have exploited the vacuum created by relentless Israeli attacks and widespread destruction of Gaza,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the commission.
“What is alarmingly similar is the deliberate infliction of suffering on Palestinian civilians. While their origins and motivations differ, both operate within environments engineered by Israel.”
The UN report essentially places Hamas and Israel on the same plane.
Other parts of the report were dedicated to Hamas’s use of physical violence and extrajudicial killings.
In Gaza, the Commission identified 249 cases of executions and severe physical violence in 2024-2025, resulting in at least 108 deaths and 384 injured.
The Commission found that Hamas-affiliated forces were involved in at least 60 of these incidents, including two public executions of 11 men. These acts amount to the war crimes of murder and torture, and abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law.
“The Commission is gravely alarmed by the severity and public nature of Hamas’s punitive measures in Gaza, which inflict profound trauma on an already severely traumatized civilian population,” said Muralidhar. “Any future framework for peace and stability in Gaza must include a clear and enforceable commitment to accountability.”
While the report noted the increase in the killing and harming of Israeli civilians by Palestinian armed groups and Palestinian individuals in 2023, it said that many of the measures imposed by Israel in response to attacks, including the recently passed death penalty law, are “incompatible with international humanitarian law and international human rights law, and may amount to international crimes.”
'Persistent bias against Israel,' UN Watch legal advisor accuses
Dina Rovner, legal advisor at UN Watch, said the reporting continues to reflect a persistent bias against Israel.
She noted that the inclusion of violations by both Israelis and Palestinians is an effort to project even-handedness, but that the distribution of attention “tells a different story.”
“More than half of the report focuses on Israeli violations against Palestinians, while only approximately 9% addresses Palestinian attacks against Israelis. Another 34% examines Hamas abuses against Palestinians in Gaza.
Even in those latter sections, however, the Commission repeatedly contextualizes or shifts blame to Israel, attributing lawlessness, repression, and social collapse primarily to Israeli actions rather than Hamas governance, effectively minimizing Hamas’s responsibility for its own crimes,” she wrote.
Rovner said that at the heart of the report is a false moral equivalence between Israeli civilians residing in the West Bank and jihadi terrorist organizations.
“The issue of extremist Israeli violence is real and should be investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However, the existence of a small number of violent Jewish extremists does not warrant the collective stigmatization of hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians,” she wrote.
Approximately 482,000 Israelis currently live in communities in the West Bank, whereas only 300 individuals are known to have engaged in violence.
Rovner also drew attention to other issues in the report.
For example, the Commission stated that it “consulted multiple sources of information,” yet much of the report relies on anonymous interviews, unattributed allegations, and undisclosed materials. This means that many supposedly factual assertions cannot be independently verified.
Additionally, Rovner highlighted the Commission’s attempts to distinguish between Hamas’s “military wing” and Hamas governing institutions, a distinction which she said (and many others say) Hamas itself does not make.
She quoted Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who explicitly rejected such separation, stating: “We cannot separate the wing from the body. If we do so, the body will not be able to fly. Hamas is one body.”
As proof of this, the US, UK, and other countries that have proscribed Hamas have done so for the whole group, and not just its so-called military wing.
Furthermore, the Commission criticized Israel for referring to Palestinian stone-throwers as “terrorists” over what it characterizes as “some stone throwing,” and gives only a brief discussion of Hamas’s torture and sexual abuse of Israeli hostages. The UN report concludes that hostages were merely “mistreated in captivity.”
The Jerusalem Post also noted that the section about settler sexual violence against Palestinians is stated as an indisputable fact, whereas it said it “documented reports by at least six released hostages (three men and three women) stating that they had been subjected to sexual and gender-based violence.”
“The tainted by selective evidence, double standards, disregard for due process, and conclusions that appear predetermined from the outset,” lamented UN Watch Director Hillel Neuer.
The Post reached out to Danny Danon for comment.