UN Confirms Israel Continues to Commit Genocide in Gaza a Year After Trump Ceasefire

A United Nations inquiry has confirmed that the Israeli state has continued to perpetrate war crimes and the crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, intentionally targeting Palestinian civilians as it continues to commit genocide in Gaza”.

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel released its fifth report on 26 October 2026. The document finds that a year after the October 2025 US president Donald Trump-brokered ceasefire, the same pre-ceasefire patterns of “systematic destruction of civilian life and objects” continue in Gaza.

The report further finds that “killings and mental harm by state actors” has dramatically increased in the West Bank since 7 October 2023. This targeting of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank is motivated by “nationality, race and ethnicity, gender and age”. Indeed, Israel ordered a lockdown of Palestinian areas in the West Bank last Friday, 23 October 2026.

The UN report is important because it confirms what many already know, that the Gaza genocide is ongoing, because this continues to be denied by Israel and its supporters.

And the report too comes at the end of a 12 month period that has seen the UN heavily undermined by the progression of the Trump ceasefire resolution, as well as via the establishment of its new rival, Trump’s Board of Peace.

This fifth UN inquiry report, which too notes that the Israeli forces are “committing age-based persecution against Palestinian children”, is further significant in that not only does it confirm the ongoing genocide by mass murder and starvation in Gaza, but it too verifies that Israel is perpetrating the crimes against humanity of extermination, torture and sexual violence in the West Bank.

Intentional killing of civilians en masse

“Since 7 October 2023, Israeli forces have used heavy and unguided munitions in densely populated areas, alongside drones, quadcopters and sniper fire, resulting in the systematic destruction of civilian life and objects,” the UN inquiry report sets out in its section on factual findings on Gaza.

“These patterns have continued after the so-called October 2025 ceasefire, with sustained air, artillery, drone and gunfire attacks resulting in over 1,431 people being killed, including at least 300 children and 130 women, and 5,026 injured as of 30 September 2026,” the UN researchers too confirmed. The document further emphasises that these findings contradict Trump’s Board of Peace.

A temporary ceasefire yellow line was established in Gaza at the time of the roll out of the Board of Peace plan. The initial line provided 47 percent of Gaza’s territory to Palestinians in the west and the rest to Israelis in the east. The inquiry found the area around the line has become a zone for killing Palestinians and it continues to creep west. So, right now, Israel occupies 65 percent of Gaza.

The inquiry has also found that “acts of sexual violence continue to be a part of a pattern to destroy the Palestinians as a group in Gaza”. Researchers further found that this sexual violence has been spilling over, so that Israeli Defence Force officers were confirmed to have perpetrated rape against foreign nationals who were part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, attempting to break the Gaza blockade.

“The cases investigated for this report show that the Israeli authorities and forces continue to commit genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza,” the report authors too make clear. “Furthermore, the commission found that much of the killing and harm caused to Palestinians is a direct result of Israel’s expansion of territorial control.”

Killing kids in the West Bank

The aggression of the Israeli state against the Palestinians in the West Bank has dramatically increased since 7 October 2023, the report finds. Over that time to September 2026, this has comprised of 1,080 killings and more than 10,000 injuries.

A broadening of the Israel Defence Force’s rules of engagement has meant that soldiers are permitted to use lethal force against Palestinians, who are perceived as a threat, even if the danger posed is not imminent. So, this means that shooting Palestinians who may pose a threat in the future is sanctioned. The IDF snipes all Palestinian children to allay any further threat from them.

“These permissive rules are interpreted and implemented in a discriminatory manner, applying exclusively to Palestinians based on their nationality, race and ethnicity,” the report confirms. “Israeli security personnel are prohibited from using lethal force against Jewish Israelis in the West Bank. Israeli forces have been responsible for approximately 95 percent of killings… since October 2023.”

The inquiry pointed to six cases it documented in the West Bank comprising killings and acts causing bodily and mental harm, which indicated that the more permissive rules of engagement were leading to more killing. These cases that occurred between November 2023 and June 2026 involved killing unarmed victims, who “did not pose a threat”. And the majority of these victims were children.

“Israeli authorities have repeatedly provided false justifications for the use of lethal force, intending to deflect responsibility,” the report continues. And it further found that the heightened violence in the West Bank since October 2023, which Israel claims is to dismantle terrorist infrastructure, ultimately, reflects the import of the Gaza strategy of total destruction into West Bank operations.

A privatised and futuristic New Gaza

In the face of the UN inquiry’s fifth report, the Trump-brokered Gaza ceasefire is laid bare for what it actually is, a cover for the Israeli state to continue its mass murder and starvation program in the Gaza Strip, as not only does Tel Aviv seek to annex Gaza as part of Israel, but the US president and his son-in-law Jared Kushner consider the region as a prime location for a privatised and futuristic city.

To facilitate the false ceasefire, the realising of Greater Israel and Trumpian moves to create new privatised economic zones, it would appear that the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 2803 on 17 November 2025, which involved the international body’s official adoption of “President Donald J Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict”.

Globally recognised Gaza scholar Dr Norman Finkelstein has been repeatedly raising the passing of resolution 2803 as proof that the United Nations is now a broken institution, as it capitulated to the designs of the MAGA White House by championing Trump’s suspect ceasefire plan, which the scholar considers to be a “revelation of moral insolvency and a declaration of war against Gaza”.

Finkelstein is clear that the progressing of the Trump resolution marks the death knell of the international body that unites nations. The scholar further substantiates this claim by explaining that all other resolutions begin with a long list of matters that are ‘recalled’, ‘reaffirmed’ and ‘emphasised’ prior to making its new case, whereas resolution 2803 breaks with this UN tradition.

“The new UN resolution deposited this comprehensive legal framework into the dumpster. All that survived was a pathetic fragment ‘noting prior relevant Security Council resolutions relating to the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question’”, Finkelstein declared on his Substack in December last year.

“What’s more, the resolution left Gaza’s legal status suspended in juridical limbo,” the Gaza scholar added.

“Nowhere did the resolution so much as hint that Gaza was part of Occupied Palestinian Territory, let alone that it was illegally occupied territory, that it is the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to exercise self-determination in the entirety of this Palestinian territory, and that Israel must withdraw from it ‘as rapidly as possible’.”

Image of a destroyed Gaza from Shutterstock