JERUSALEM / ISTANBUL
Israeli human rights organizations on Tuesday deemed 2025 the “deadliest and most destructive” year for Palestinians, with Israel doubling its killing and displacement of civilians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
This came in a joint report released by 12 Israeli human rights groups: Bimkom (Planners for Planning Rights), Gisha, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, HaMoked (Center for the Defence of the Individual), Yesh Din, Combatants for Peace, Ir Amim, Emek Shaveh, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, Breaking the Silence, and Torat Tzedek.
“In 2023 and 2024, grave violations were documented in Gaza (during the Israeli genocide), but the outcomes in 2025 reveal a sharp deterioration, with the death toll nearly doubling, displacement becoming almost across the entire enclave, and hunger becoming a cause of mass death,” the report said.
“Violations that were considered exceptional at the start of the war became part of daily practice” in the current year, the rights groups said.
“The second year of the war in Gaza was the deadliest and most destructive for Palestinians since 1967.”
Figures released by the Israeli rights groups showed that the death toll from the Israeli war reached over 36,000 in March 2024 and rose to 67,173 by October 2025, including more than 20,000 children and around 10,000 women, in addition to an estimated 10,000 bodies still under the rubble. The number of wounded surpassed 170,000.
According to the report, Palestinian displacement in 2025 reached 1.9 million people—around 90% of Gaza’s population—up from about 1 million in 2024.
Many were displaced multiple times, the report said, as entire neighborhoods and vital infrastructure, including water and electricity, collapsed.
Regarding Israeli-induced starvation, the report said that 461 people, including 157 children, died of hunger by October 2025.
The rights groups said that 2,306 Palestinians were killed and 16,929 injured while waiting for aid delivery in a “daily tragedy” created by the Israeli mechanism in 2025.
Settler violence
According to the rights groups, about 1,200 attacks by illegal settlers were recorded between 2023 and 2024 in the occupied West Bank, while large-scale violence escalated in 2025.
The report found that 44 Palestinian herding communities were fully displaced, and 10 communities were partially emptied, taking the total number of displaced Palestinians to 2,932, including 1,326 children.
It added that the number of administrative detainees, who are held without charge, rose from 1,000 in 2023 to 3,577 in 2025, three times the prewar average.
The report documented at least 98 Palestinian deaths in Israeli custody due to torture, denial of medical treatment, and inhumane detention conditions.
“2025 revealed a reality previously unimaginable: a state operating without limits, systematically violating international law, dismantling the very values it claims to uphold. Israel cannot claim morality or self-defense.”
Palestinian and Israeli rights organizations have repeatedly reported torture of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, including beatings, starvation, and sexual abuse.
The Israeli army has escalated its attacks in the West Bank since the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023.
More than 1,085 Palestinians have since been killed, and 10,700 others injured in attacks by the army and illegal Israeli settlers in the occupied territory.
Over 20,500 people have also been arrested.
In a landmark opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.