Israeli Genocide in Gaza, West Bank as Lifelines for Palestinians cut off

OIC Secretariat

Jedddah, 23-09-2025 - Israeli occupation forces killed 442 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in one week, including dozens of martyrs who were seeking food. The OIC Media Observatory on Israeli Crimes Against Palestinians recorded 1,891 wounded between September 16 and 22, 2025. The total number of Palestinians killed from October 7, 2023, to September 22, 2025, reached approximately 66,386, with 175,881 wounded.

The Israeli occupation army announced that it bombed Gaza City 150 times in 48 hours last week, with the majority of martyrs concentrated in the city. The occupation forces also invaded Gaza City and cut off internet and communication services, amid reports that they were seeking to establish camps for displaced persons from Gaza, similar to detention camps. An independent international commission of inquiry affiliated with the United Nations accused Israel, the occupying power, of committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip.

The occupation forces continued their invasion and remained stationed in areas north and east of the northern Gaza Strip, advancing into the towns of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia, while Israeli warplanes carried out repeated raids targeting numerous sites, facilities, and residential buildings in all governorates of the Gaza Strip. Medical sources in Gaza confirmed that a number of victims remain trapped under the rubble and in the streets, with ambulance crews and civil defense personnel unable to reach them.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) confirmed that 12 of its facilities in Gaza City were directly or indirectly bombed between September 11 and 16, including nine schools and two health centers, all of which housed more than 11,000 displaced persons. UNRWA noted that the massive destruction of infrastructure, coupled with restrictions on humanitarian access, severely hampered the last remaining lifelines for civilians in the city.

On September 16, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide, explaining that the occupation authorities had prevented trusted relief agencies, including UNRWA, from delivering basic and life-saving aid with the aim of “destroying the Palestinians in Gaza materially through harsh living conditions.”

For its part, UNRWA noted that the Israeli occupation forces had tightened restrictions on movement in the West Bank, including the installation of new road gates to control the movement of Palestinians within and outside their communities.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that nearly half of the displacements (out of a total of 246,800) recorded since mid-August occurred in the past week alone, with displaced families sleeping in the streets or in makeshift tents and struggling to survive. The UN also noted that the cost of displacement from Gaza City to the south amounts to $3,000 per family, forcing thousands of families and their children to flee on foot for long distances.

The High-Level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Palestinian Question, chaired by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the French Republic, which was held in New York on September 22, 2025, issued a joint statement welcoming the recognition of the State of Palestine by Australia, Belgium, Canada, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Andorra, Monaco, and San Marino, along with France, calling on other countries that have not yet taken this step to join this path. The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates affirmed that these recognitions represent an acknowledgment of the just and legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and constitute a shield to protect the two-state solution in the face of the crimes of occupation, extermination, starvation, displacement, and annexation. It renewed its call to the United States and other countries to recognize Palestine and stand on the right side of history.

Dozens of Western countries also called on Israel to reopen the medical corridor between Gaza and the occupied West Bank, offering financial aid, medical teams, and equipment to treat patients from Gaza.

The occupation forces targeted the family of Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, director of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex, as part of the pressure they are exerting on medical and media personnel, while killing two journalists, one of whom was a photojournalist in a camp for displaced persons in Gaza City.

In the West Bank, the occupation forces escalated their operations, issuing a decision to confiscate 288 square meters of the inner courtyard of the Ibrahimi Mosque to enable settlers to perform their Talmudic rituals, and raiding the Abdul Rahman Mosque in the village of Burin in Nablus. The occupation forces also demolished four houses in Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus, a car wash in the village of Husan in Bethlehem, five barns in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Nablus, and agricultural facilities in Jerusalem. They also burned a car in Ramallah and bulldozed the eastern entrance to the town of Ya'bad in Jenin. They also continued to demolish the Khallet al-Daba area in Masafar Yatta in Hebron for the second time after demolishing it in May 2025, including caves and residential tents, water networks, sanitary units, solar energy cells, and surveillance cameras. The Israeli occupation forces also uprooted about 100 trees in Beita, Nablus, and confiscated a mobile home in the town of Al-Khader, Bethlehem.

In terms of resource theft, the Israeli occupation forces cut off electricity and water lines to the village of Um al-Khair, east of Yatta. Settlers also removed water meters in the village of Duma in Nablus, causing water shortages, destroyed a water pump in Masafar Yatta, cut electricity lines and water pipes supplying homes, and seized a water well in the area.

The occupation forces carried out 337 raids, during which they arrested 157 Palestinians, including a child in Qalqilya, and injured another child in Ramallah.

Settlers committed 74 attacks, including grazing on Palestinian village lands such as Duma, Asira al-Shamaliya, and Beit Dajan in the Nablus governorate, Marah al-Batiniya, al-Burj, al-Khalil, and the Naba' al-Ghazal area in Tubas. They set fire to agricultural land in Majdal Bani Fadel, bulldozed land in Batn al-Halaweh in Ramallah, damaged sheep farms in Deir Dibwan, destroyed excavators and bulldozers in Taybeh, damaged water tanks in Duma, seized 250 sheep from the village of Rammun, and cut down 300 trees in the western part of Ramallah.

The Israeli occupation forces also issued a decision to confiscate 300 dunums of land in Bint Issa and Kuleiba, west of the town of Nahalin, and change its use from agricultural to residential for the benefit of settlement projects. They bulldozed 200 dunums adjacent to the city of Tulkarm to protect the “Beit Hafer” settlement.

Settlers erected a mobile home on land west of the village of Yanoun in Nablus and began expanding a settlement outpost near Hawara, east of Yatta. They also built roads on land in the town of Samu in Hebron and plowed agricultural land in Nabeh al-Ghazal in Tubas. In addition, they erected a barbed-wire fence around grazing areas east of Atouf in Tubas. A new pastoral settlement outpost was established in the Sakut area in the northern Jordan Valley, to which large numbers of cows were brought. – OIC News