Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the UN report cited an 'unprecedented deterioration of the human rights situation' in the West Bank, and called out the intensified 'repression of civil society.'

The United Nations said decades of discrimination and segregation of Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank were intensifying, and called on the country to end its “apartheid system” on Wednesday, January 7.

In a new report, the UN rights office said the “systematic discrimination” against Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territories had “drastically deteriorated” in recent years.

“There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement. “Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives – every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices,” he added. “This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before.”