Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have expanded in record numbers and risk eliminating any practical possibility of a Palestinian state, the UN’s top human rights official said today.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said that the development of Israeli settlements is equivalent to a transfer from Israel of its population, which is, as he repeated, war crime. US President Joe Biden’s administration said last month that the settlements were “inconsistent” with international law after Israel announced new settlement plans in the occupied West Bank.

“Settlement violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian State,” Turk said in a statement accompanying a report to be presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. at the end of March.

There is currently no comment from the Israeli diplomatic mission in Geneva on the report.

The 16-page report, based on the UN’s own surveillance as well as other sources, recorded 24,300 new Israeli housing units in the occupied West Bank in the 12 months before the end of October 2023, a number it says is the highest on record since monitoring began in 2017.

It also reports that there has been a dramatic increase in the intensity, ferocity and regularity of both Israeli settler and state violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, particularly following the deadly attacks by Hamas on Israel on 7 October.

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

Israel, which occupied the West Bank in the 1967 war, claims it has a biblical birthright to the land where the settlements are expanding. His army says it is conducting counter-terrorism operations in the West Bank and targeting suspected militants.

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

He has documented cases of settlers wearing full or partial Israeli army uniforms and carrying army rifles while harassing or attacking Palestinians, blurring the lines between them. Sometimes they were shot at point blank range, he said.

The war in Gaza has brought back into focus the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict envisioned by the Oslo Accords since the early 1990s.

But little progress has been made towards achieving statehood for the Palestinians since then, and settlement expansion is one of the obstacles.