GENEVA: The UN warned on Tuesday that mass displacement in the West Bank had hit levels not seen since the start of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory nearly 60 years ago.

The United Nations said an Israeli military operation launched in the north of the occupied territory in January had displaced tens of thousands of people, raising concerns about possible “ethnic cleansing”.

The military operation “has been the longest since … the second Intifada”, in the early 2000s, said Juliette Touma, spokeswoman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

“It is impacting several refugee camps in the area, and it is causing the largest population displacement of the Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967,” she told reporters in Geneva via video from Jordan, referring to the six-day Arab-Israeli war that led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

The UN rights office meanwhile warned that mass forced displacement by an occupation force could amount to “ethnic cleansing”.

Since Israel’s military launched its operation “Iron Wall” in the north of the West Bank in January, rights office spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan said that “about 30,000 Palestinians remain forcibly displaced”.

Israeli security forces had during the same period issued demolition orders for about 1,400 homes in the northern West Bank, he said, describing the figures as “alarming”.

He pointed out that Israeli demolitions had displaced 2,907 Palestinians across the West Bank since October 2023.

Another 2,400 Palestinians — nearly half of them children — had been displaced as a result of Israeli settler actions, he added, lamenting that the combined result was the “emptying large parts of the West Bank of Palestinians”.

“Permanently displacing the civilian population within occupied territory amounts to unlawful transfer,” Kheetan said, stressing that depending on the circumstances this could be “tantamount to ethnic cleansing” and could “amount to a crime against humanity”. Kheetan said 757 attacks by Israeli settlers had been recorded in the West Bank during the first half of the year, a 13 percent increase on the same period in 2024.

The attacks injured 96 Palestinians in the occupied territory in June alone, he told reporters, stressing that this was the highest monthly injury toll of Palestinians from settler attacks “in over two decades”. Violence in the West Bank has surged since October 2023.

Since then, at least 964 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, according to the UN. During that same period, 53 Israelis have been killed in reported attacks by Palestinians or in armed clashes — 35 of them in the West Bank and 18 in Israel.

Published in Dawn, July 16th, 2025