Israeli settlements expand by record amount, UN rights chief says

[Pelican Press 0]

******** settlements expand by record amount, UN rights chief says

A ************ neighborhood is seen from the window of a building inside an ******** settlement in the city of Hebron on January 18, 2017 in Hebron, West Bank.

Chris McGrath | Getty Images

******** settlements in the occupied ************ territories have expanded by a record amount and risk eliminating any practical possibly of a ************ state, the U.N. human rights chief said on Friday.

The ******* Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said that the growth of ******** settlements amounted to the transfer by ******* of its own population, which he reiterated was a war ******. The U.S. Biden administration said last month the settlements were “inconsistent” with international law after ******* announced 

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 in the occupied West Bank.

“Settler ********* and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable ************ State,” Turk said in a statement accompanying the report which will be presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva in late March.

*******’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said that the report should have included the deaths of 36 Israelis in 2023. “Human rights are universal, yet ******** victims of ************ terrorism are ignored by the Office (of the High Commissioner) time and time again,” it said in a statement.

The 16-page report, based on the U.N.’s own monitoring as well as other sources, documented 24,300 new ******** housing units in the occupied West Bank during a one-year ******* through to end-October 2023, which it said was the highest on record since monitoring began in 2017.

Rising *********

It also said there had been a dramatic increase in the intensity, severity and regularity of both ******** settler and state ********* against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, particularly since the 

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.

Since then, more than 400 Palestinians have been ******* by ******** security forces or by settlers, it said.

*******, which captured the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war, claims a biblical birthright to the land where settlements are expanding. Its military says it is conducting counter-terrorism operations in the West Bank and is targeting suspected militants.

Turk’s report noted that the policies of *******’s government, which is the most right-wing in the country’s history and includes religious nationalists with close ties to settlers, appeared aligned to an “unprecedented extent” with the goals of the ******** settler movement.

It has documented cases of settlers wearing full or partial ******** army uniforms and carrying army rifles while harassing or attacking Palestinians, in a blurring of the lines between them. Sometimes they were shot at point-blank range, it said.

The five-month-old Gaza war has put a renewed focus on a 

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 to the ********-************ conflict as foreseen by the Oslo accords from the early 1990s.

But there has been little progress on achieving ************ statehood since then, with the expansion of settlements being one of the obstacles.

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