The U.N. human rights office Tuesday expressed concerns about possible “ethnic cleansing,” denouncing an acceleration of Israeli settlements and displacements of thousands of Palestinians in large parts of the occupied West Bank that has grown “more relentless” in recent months.
A new report from the office of Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, covers a yearlong period through the end of October and warns of expanded settlements in large parts of the West Bank and the forced displacement of more than 36,000 Palestinians.
Since then, “the pace of the concerted efforts by the Israeli government to seize as much Palestinian land as possible — with as few Palestinians in it as possible — is only becoming more relentless,” Ajith Sunghay, the head of the rights office in occupied Palestinian areas, told a U.N. briefing in Geneva.
The Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva responded by saying that as far as Israel was concerned, the U.N. rights office “has lost all credibility.” It alluded to longtime allegations — backed often by the United States — of unfair bias against Israel and a relative disregard of other human rights situations around the world.
“It does not function as an impartial and neutral human rights office, but as the epicenter of vile anti-Israel activism,” the mission said in a statement, blasting a “U.N. anti-Israel narrative machine” that has produced several reports about Israeli settlements in recent months.
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