GENEVA: Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip seem aimed at creating “permanent demographic change”, UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday.

“Taken together, Israel’s actions appear aimed at making a permanent demographic change in Gaza and the West Bank, raising concerns about ethnic cleansing”, Turk said in a speech before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Turk pointed in particular to an ongoing, year-long Israeli military operation in the West Bank’s north that has caused the displacement of 32,000 Palestinians. Elsewhere in the West Bank, entire Bedouin herder communities have been displaced by increasing harassment and violence from Israeli settlers, including near Mikhmas to the east of Ramallah, and Ras Ein al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, since the start of the year.

In addition to roughly three million Palestinians, more than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements and outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.

Far-right minister Smotrich vows to encourage ‘emigration’ from Palestinian territories

Israel has approved a series of initiatives this month backed by far-right ministers, including launching a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property” and allowing Israelis to purchase land there directly, in a move condemned by several countries as well as Hamas.

Israel’s current government has accelerated settlement expansion, approving a record 54 settlements in 2025, according to Israeli settlement watchdog NGO Peace Now.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.

‘Maximum land, minimum Arabs’

In the Gaza Strip, most of the territory’s 2.2 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once since the start of the conflict on October 7, 2023. “Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighbourhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza”, the UN human rights office said in a report last week.

Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also vowed to encourage “emigration” from the Palestinian territories in February.

“We will finally, formally and in practical terms nullify the cursed Oslo Accords and embark on a path toward sovereignty, while encouraging emigration from both Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.

“There is no other long-term solution,” added Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank.

“They want maximum land and minimum Arabs”, Fathi Nimer, a researcher with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, said, referring to a commonly used phrase used to describe Israeli settlement tactics.

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2026