The top United Nations human rights official has warned of the worsening situation for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the “unconscionable death and suffering” in the Gaza Strip.
“The situation in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is dramatically deteriorating,” Volker Turk told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday.
He said 528 Palestinians, 133 of them children, were killed by Israeli military forces or settlers from the start of the current war on Gaza in October to June 15, “in many cases raising serious concerns of unlawful killings”.
In the same period, 23 Israelis were killed in clashes with Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel, including eight members of security forces, according to the UN’s high commissioner for human rights.
Two weeks ago, Turk said people in the West Bank were being “subjected to day after day of unprecedented bloodshed”.
He spoke as the Israeli military arrested at least five Palestinians during the storming of several towns and villages in Ramallah and el-Bireh governorate in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, which also reported a settler attack on Palestinian farmland in the village of Yasuf, east of Salfit.
Overnight, Israeli forces arrested dozens of Palestinians in Qusrah near Nablus, also in the West Bank, taking them to a school where they were held and interrogated, Wafa reported.
Israeli forces have been rounding up an average of 35 Palestinians a day since the war started, with 9,112 Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails as of June 1, nearly double the number of Palestinians jailed on October 1, according to tallies by Palestinian prisoners groups.