Eight United Nations special rapporteurs and working groups issued a joint statement on 13 April finding that 92 percent of Gaza's housing has been destroyed and that the repeated displacement of virtually the entire population constitutes forcible transfer. Forcible transfer is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention under Article 147 and a crime against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population. The statement was issued six months and three days after the 10 October 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect, and during a period in which the Palestinian Ministry of Health recorded 773 Palestinians killed since that ceasefire.
The experts wrote that the Gaza population, "subjected to multiple displacement orders and widespread destruction affecting 92 per cent of housing", had already been displaced multiple times "which amounts to forcible transfer". Civilians in tents and makeshift shelters, the statement said, faced "attacks, freezing, flooding and building collapse, lack of basic services for their survival and severe humanitarian hardship, with women and children bearing a disproportionate share of deprivation." The experts cited a specific Israeli strike on 11 March 2026 near the Qatari Committee building in western Gaza City, which ignited a fire that spread to tents sheltering displaced persons, and an 8 March shelling of displaced civilian tents in As Sawarha that killed two women and a girl.
The signatories included Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967; Tlaleng Mofokeng, Special Rapporteur on the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health; and rapporteurs on adequate housing, food, water and sanitation, internally displaced persons, counter-terrorism, and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls. They concluded: "The scale and pattern of these actions, occurring alongside mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes and land in Gaza, shows once again the ongoing broader policy of ethnic cleansing across the occupied Palestinian territory."
A separate March 2026 analysis by the Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing concluded that the systematic destruction of Gaza's housing, widely termed "domicide", amounted to war crimes, had reached the threshold for crimes against humanity, and had reached the threshold for genocide. The same UN experts, writing again on 16 April on Israeli conduct in Lebanon, described Israeli evacuation orders and the destruction of southern Lebanese villages as "consistent with the pattern of domicide that was initiated during the genocide in Gaza".
The October 2025 ceasefire is not functioning as a ceasefire
UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said on 10 April that Palestinians "have no blueprint for survival" and that it was hard to square the situation in Gaza with a ceasefire. The Palestinian Ministry of Health as of 18 April recorded 72,549 Palestinians killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023 and 172,274 injured. Since the 10 October 2025 ceasefire, 773 Palestinians have been killed and 2,171 wounded. Rescue teams have recovered 761 bodies from under rubble in the same period. The IDF's own estimate, conveyed by military officials to Israeli journalists in January 2026, put the Gaza war dead at approximately 70,000, aligning broadly with Ministry of Health figures and retiring two and a half years of Israeli government denials that those figures were reliable.
Specific incidents since early April illustrate the pattern. On 8 April, an Israeli drone strike killed the Al Jazeera journalist Mohamed Washah in Gaza City. The IDF said afterward that it assessed him to have been a Hamas operative. On 9 April, Ritaj Rihan, a third-grade schoolgirl, was killed when Israeli fire opened on a crowded tent encampment housing her makeshift classroom in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza. On 20 April, Rasha Abu Jazar, a 40-year-old seven months pregnant, was killed by Israeli gunfire in the al-Mawasi tent camp near Rafah, southern Gaza, according to the Quds News Network.
Across 7 October 2023 to 6 April 2026, documented deaths reported by the Gaza Health Ministry include at least 270 journalists and media workers, 120 academics, and over 560 humanitarian aid workers, including 391 UNRWA staff. A peer-reviewed Lancet analysis published in January 2025 estimated that 59.1 percent of traumatic-injury deaths during the first nine months of the war were women, children, and the elderly. The UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, in a 4 April 2026 statement, said Israel was continuing to perpetrate genocidal acts in Gaza, a finding that extends and reaffirms its earlier determination covering the October 2023 to July 2025 period.
Reconstruction as silent transfer
Three thousand kilometres from Gaza, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Jared Kushner (USian, born 10 January 1981, Livingston, New Jersey, US) presented Donald Trump's son-in-law's vision of a "New Gaza": skyscrapers, waterfront tourism, and a logistical corridor connecting a demilitarised enclave to global markets. On the ground, 61 million tonnes of debris remain. Not a single brick has been laid. The UN estimates reconstruction cost at $70 billion. Analysts and urban planners interviewed by Al Jazeera described the reconstruction architecture as a tool of political extortion and demographic change, rather than recovery. Ihab Jabareen, an Israeli-affairs researcher, told the network: "Reconstruction is not the day after the war; it is the continuation of war by bureaucratic and economic means."
Trump's US blueprint for Gaza includes what the administration has called a Board of Peace, a transitional authority overseen personally by Trump, an international stabilisation force, and a gestured-at possible future path to Palestinian statehood. UN experts have condemned the framework, calling instead for a reparative rights-based approach in which Palestinians lead and benefit from reconstruction. Meanwhile, Israeli-backed militias clashed with Hamas-aligned fighters inside Gaza throughout April, complicating any international stabilisation scenario that assumes a single Palestinian authority in the enclave.
The West Bank settlement surge
On 1 April 2026, Netanyahu's security cabinet approved the establishment of 34 new settlements in the occupied West Bank. The decision was classified at the time and was reported by Israeli outlets only on 9 April, after the military censor cleared publication. It is the largest batch of new settlements approved by any Israeli government at one time. It brings the total of new settlements established or retroactively legalised by the current coalition since 2022 to 103. Peace Now reports that 54 settlements were approved in 2025 alone, breaking the previous record of nine set in 2023, and that unauthorised outposts reached 86 during the same period, averaging one to two new outposts per week. In the 30 years between the 1993 Oslo Accords and the formation of the current coalition, Israel formally approved six new settlements.
The 34 new settlements are spread across the West Bank from north to south. Eight fall inside Area B, the 22 percent of the West Bank under joint Israeli and Palestinian Authority administration. The Oslo framework assigned Area B's civil affairs to the PA, which holds exclusive jurisdiction only in Area A, 18 percent of the territory; the remaining 61 percent, Area C, is under full Israeli control. Peace Now said the latest cabinet decision provides for water and electricity infrastructure to be installed at the new settlements before they receive planning approval from the Israeli Civil Administration. Peace Now's own summary: "While we were running to bomb shelters, it was urgent for cabinet members to establish dozens more new settlements in the West Bank, thereby advancing the Smotrich plan for ethnic cleansing of the West Bank by pushing the Palestinians into small, densely populated enclaves in Area A."
On 19 April, Defence Minister Israel Katz, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir attended a ceremony re-establishing the Sa-Nur settlement, in the northern West Bank near Jenin. Sa-Nur was dismantled in 2005 under Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, which also removed Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. At the ceremony, Smotrich said the re-establishment "abolishes the disgrace of expulsion" and was "killing the idea of the Palestinian state". He called for Israel to settle "all of Gaza" and to expand borders across Lebanon and Syria. The Homesh settlement, also dismantled in 2005, has likewise been approved for reconstitution.
The settlement drive is explicitly political. The Times of Israel reports that only a handful of the 103 newly approved settlements have been processed through the Civil Administration's planning channels. The government has streamlined the approval route. Writing for Mondoweiss on 19 April, Qassam Muaddi described the timing as Israel perceiving "a closing window for its ability to entrench its colonial project in its own backyard", with Netanyahu and his hardline partners facing low polling numbers ahead of elections and seeking a victory in settlement terrain after strategic ceasefires on the Iran and Lebanon fronts.
Settler violence, demolitions, displacement
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported a 54 percent increase in settler attack injuries in the West Bank so far this year compared to 2025 averages, and a more than fourfold increase in settler-linked Palestinian displacement. Between late January and early April 2026, approximately 360 Palestinians were injured by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, nearly matching the full-year totals for 2023 and 2024 combined. March 2026 recorded the highest monthly settler-injury figure since documentation began in 2006.
A UN Human Rights Office report covering the 12 months to October 2025 documented 1,732 incidents of settler violence causing casualties or property damage, and described the pattern as "a concerted Israeli policy of mass forcible transfer throughout the occupied territory, aimed at permanent displacement, raising concerns of ethnic cleansing." Between the start of 2025 and February 2026, at least 700 Palestinians had been displaced by settler violence directly. UN experts said in the 13 April statement that more than 36,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced in the West Bank during 2025 alone.
The Arab Center DC, citing UN data, reports that approximately 360 Palestinian homes were demolished in the West Bank during the first quarter of 2026, displacing at least 560 people. At the same pace, 2026 is on track to exceed the 2024 record of 1,769 demolitions, the highest annual figure since monitoring began in 2009. The 13 April UN statement singled out Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem, as a community facing imminent eviction and demolition.
On 8 April, in the village of Tayasir near Tubas in the northern West Bank, a 28-year-old Palestinian was killed in a settler attack. The Israeli military said an off-duty soldier had fired during a stone-throwing incident, without clarifying whether the soldier had been among the settlers attacking the village. Hussam Abdel Latif Wahdan, a 65-year-old farmer assaulted by around 12 settlers the same night, told Reuters: "They don't want to leave any place for us." Sarit Michaeli of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said settlers are attacking Palestinians throughout the West Bank with impunity, displacing entire communities. Dror Etkes of Kerem Navot, which tracks settlements, said that since October 2023, settlers have deliberately targeted Area B and Area A, the zones where Israeli law formally ceded civil authority to the PA.
Action on Armed Violence data shows Israel has closed 88 percent of its own investigations into alleged abuses by its forces in Gaza and the West Bank without charges or findings of wrongdoing.
UNRWA blocked, the ICJ ruling unenforced
UNRWA has been blocked by Israeli authorities from directly bringing humanitarian personnel and supplies into Gaza since March 2025. The International Court of Justice ruled in October 2025 that Israel was obligated to guarantee sufficient food to Gaza's population and to permit UNRWA to operate. That obligation has not been met. Since 7 October 2023, 391 UNRWA staff have been killed, which UN experts note makes the agency the worst-hit UN humanitarian operation in the organisation's history.
The joint scorecard published by the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Danish Refugee Council, Oxfam, Save the Children, and Refugees International assesses the October 2025 ceasefire implementation as "regrettably failing" across its four pillars: aid delivery, civilian protection, governance, and basic services restoration. Israeli strikes in the first 10 days of April killed Palestinians "in what is left of their homes, shelters and tents of displaced families, on the streets, in vehicles, at a medical facility and a classroom", Türk said. Over 700 Palestinians killed and over 2,000 injured in the six-month post-ceasefire window.
The accountability gap
The UN experts' 13 April statement calls on states to bring Israel's unlawful occupation to an end, refrain from recognising it, withhold assistance to it, and take effective measures to ensure investigations and accountability. The legal frameworks the statement points to exist. Their enforcement does not.
The ICJ's provisional measures requiring Israel to prevent acts of genocide and ensure humanitarian access remain unenforced. The UN Security Council remains blocked from enforcement action by the US veto. No EU member state has invoked the EU Magnitsky Act against individuals responsible for obstruction of aid to Gaza. Canada has not activated its Fighting Against Forced Labour Act against companies operating in conditions linked to the occupation. A European citizens' petition to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement has passed one million signatures. The European Commission has not moved on it.
In the meantime, the destruction, the displacement, and the settlement approvals continue on the timetable set by their signatories, not the timetable set by the courts.