A UN commission report published on October 26 says Israel continued to commit genocidal acts in Gaza after the October 2025 ceasefire, citing heavy weapons in populated areas and an advancing ceasefire line, findings Israel dismissed as a misinformation campaign.
A United Nations commission of inquiry says Israel continued to commit genocide in Gaza after last October's United States-brokered ceasefire, in a report published on Monday that Israel dismissed as part of a misinformation campaign. The report, by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, examines violations against Palestinian children from the start of the war on October 7, 2023 up to September this year.
The commission says Israeli authorities kept committing genocidal acts with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza, and that the situation also continued to deteriorate in the occupied West Bank. It points to Israeli forces continuing to use heavy munitions, drones, quadcopters, artillery and sniper fire in densely populated areas during the ceasefire, and says the Yellow Line presented as a temporary ceasefire demarcation was encroaching further into Gaza and becoming a de facto border, reflecting expanding territorial control.
The report's West Bank findings are stark in their own right. In its account to the UN Security Council, the commission says Palestinians killed in airstrikes there rose from six between 2008 and October 6, 2023 to 254 between October 7, 2023 and September 30, 2026, and that military operations since January 2025 led to the largest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967, with 34,176 people still displaced as of August 2026. Its chair, Srinivasan Muralidhar, said the intentional killing of Palestinian civilians and destruction of homes in the West Bank formed part of a broader strategy to exterminate and displace Palestinians.
Reuters reporting of the report confirms its central findings, its time span and Israel's rejection, and the commission's own history gives the new document its context: a previous commission report in September last year had already found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The new report's figures for the dead in Gaza itself rest on Palestinian authorities, who say more than 74,000 people have been killed in Israel's assault, launched after Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Those totals could not be independently verified from the reporting available, and the commission's legal characterisation of genocide is its own finding, not a ruling by the International Court of Justice or a criminal conviction.
Israel's mission in Geneva rejected the report outright, calling it part of a misinformation campaign to demonise Israel and deny its right to exist and defend itself, in the words of Ambassador Daniel Meron. The commission also faulted the Palestinian Authority, saying it had targeted Palestinians who voice dissenting views and that journalists and human rights defenders had been killed and injured.
The report lands a year into a ceasefire that was supposed to stop the killing, and its central question is now what follows from a UN investigative finding that the conduct continued after the truce. The commission's findings can be used in legal proceedings, but enforcement rests with states and courts, and the next dated test will be how governments respond to a document that accuses a state of genocide during a ceasefire it had agreed to.