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Factsheet: “Alarming and urgent”: The escalation of settler violence and forced displacement in the West Bank (December 2023)

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While the world focuses on the bombardment enacted on the Gaza Strip, the West Bank is witnessing what the UN is calling an “alarming and urgent” escalation of violence. The formation of an emergency government in Israel and the declaration of war has dually served to tighten the occupation’s grip over the West Bank. Being dealt with as a closed military zone, the territory has been subject to access restrictions, near daily military raids, wholesale arrests of civilians, and the intensified arming of settlers, resulting in mounting death and injury tolls and displacement of civilians.

According to OCHA and through the previous two months (October 7 – December 14) 262 Palestinians have been killed, including 67 children (11 people, including 3 children, were killed by settlers and the remainder killed by the Israeli military). This figure is more than half of the fatalities reported in 2023 (499), as per OCHA. This is in addition to the 3,512 Palestinians, including 542 children, who have been injured (83 Palestinians were injured by settlers and the remainder by the Israeli military). Wholesale arrest campaigns have also resulted in 3,680 Palestinians being arrested (3 killed under custody), with an additional 5,000+/- Gazan workers detained in Israel, with OHCHR reporting beatings and ill-treatment of detainees, “possibly amounting to torture”.

Access restrictions in the form of fixed checkpoints, flying checkpoints, gates, earth mounds and concrete blocks, manned by Israeli military forces, along with the prevalence of sporadic attacks by armed Israeli settlers have made travel between cities, towns and villages, in the West Bank both dangerous and time-consuming.