SETTLER violence in the West Bank is part of an Israeli policy to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian territory, according to a leading Israeli human rights activist who was in Belfast this week.
Ori Givati, who is Director of International Relations at B’Tselem, spoke at a number of engagements organised by Trócaire who are a long-standing partner of the Israeli human rights organisation.
Ori previously served in the Israeli military. He said it was that experience that was the catalyst for his humanitarian work today.
Since B’Tselem’s inception in 1989 the organisation has documented, analysed and exposed Israeli human rights violations against Palestinians, particularly in Gaza and the West Bank.
“One of our recent reports, the 2021 report ‘This is Apartheid’ basically states that Israel’s regime in all the territories it controls is an apartheid regime, where the Jewish group is defined as the group that is superior to everyone else,” he said.
“Another report in 2025 ‘Our Genocide’ looked at Israel’s assault against Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, including the mass killings – over 70,000 killed to date – the mass displacement of 1.9 million Palestinians by Israel in Gaza today, living in tents and camps. The malicious destruction of infrastructure – over 90 per cent of infrastructure in Gaza destroyed by Israel since October 2023 – and the overall assault against the viability of the possibility of Palestinian existence in the Strip including assault on healthcare and health facilities and education facilities and the ability to conduct any kind of viable life. Combined with the fact that we have statements and declarations by Israeli leaders since October 2023, what we’re looking at in this recent report is the genocide and as the name of the report suggests all this amounts to genocide.”
Other recent B’Tselem reports casts a light on the plight of Palestinian prisoners. 9,500 Palestinians are detained in Israeli detention facilities which Ori says are torture camps. He says B’Tselem have collected and documented testimonies from Palestinians who have been released who speak of different types of torture, both physical and mental, being used against them, including sexual violence. “All of them will go through some kind of torture,” he adds.
“Torture varies in the way that it is conducted. But the testimonies are very coherent. It can be physical violence. It can be sexual violence. We have horrific testimonies of prisoners being penetrated with sharp objects. Also denial of medical care and the mental torture. We are talking about different forms of torture across different facilities and this is a systematic issue and that is why in our report we describe this transformation from detention facilities to a network of torture camps."
Since October 2023 there has been “an overall intensification of every part of Israel’s assault against Palestinians across the territories it controls”, Ori continues.
“When we look on Gaza we are seeing the genocide started in October 2023 following the horrific crimes committed by Hamas against Israeli citizens and since then Israel has been committing genocide and today, which is very important to remember, the genocide in Gaza is still ongoing. Since the declaration of the ceasefire in 2025 over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israel and this is all going unnoticed because of a so-called ceasefire agreement which has nothing to do with a ceasefire because the firing is ongoing on a daily basis.
“We have ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in the West Bank which is depriving Palestinians of the opportunity of a viable existence in their home in the West Bank and that is also an ongoing process that includes violence from settler militia.”
Describing the settler violence in the West Bank which B’Tselem have documented, he said: “We have hundreds of settler outposts that are usually farms, they are fully supported by the state, allowing these outposts to grow and be built by settlers and they are usually the strongholds where the violence of the settlers come from. The settler militia attack on a daily basis the Palestinian communities across the West Bank in different shapes and forms. It can be herding on their agricultural land, it can be driving quickly through their villages, it can be many types of harassment. This violence in many cases also is perpetrated more harshly when it comes to stone-throwing, burning down Palestinian homes and physically attacking Palestinians with the full support of Israel and the military who protect the perpetrators and sometimes participate in these attacks. They (Palestinians) are basically left to their fate and that creates a situation that since October 2023 until today over 64 Palestinian communities have been fully transferred because of that. People in their homes have no-one to protect them from horrific violence.”
Ori explains that when Palestinian families are forcibly displaced from their homes that the settlers start to use their land for agriculture, sometimes demolishing their homes and “creating the situation where it is impossible to return”.
“Because it has been so successful for the settlers – together with the military – in transferring so many communities, now this is extending into urban areas of the West Bank. It used to be focused on rural communities but now we are seeing the extension into the urban Palestinian communities across the West Bank.”
He added: “Israel is involved in a full-scale assault against Palestinians across all the territories where it is involved. A huge part of this assault is killing in Gaza – over 70,000 since October 2023. In the West Bank from October 2023 until July this year we are talking about 1,100 Palestinians killed. Out of that number 242 were minors, 37 of them (killed) by settlers, so the vast majority were killed by Israeli military. So, while there is very justified focus on settler violence against Palestinians the military is the main element that is conducting daily violence against Palestinians across the West Bank which comes in the shape of daily operations and campaigns across the territory as well as targeted operations specifically against refugee camps. In the beginning of 2025 we saw the campaign against the main refugee camps in the West Bank which resulted in the displacement of 40,000 Palestinians who are until this day not able to return, even after those campaigns ended."
Ori said this year alone that 74 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, 14 of them by settlers, while 15 of those killed were children. These killings are part of Israel’s broader policy to ethnically cleanse the West Bank, he insists.
"What we are seeing in the West Bank is an entire system that uses different mechanisms to achieve its goal. We are seeing the violence of settler militia to make life basically impossible for Palestinians and transferring them from their communities, and we are seeing the violence of the military like we mentioned in the refugee camps displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians from their home. We're seeing the very permissive open fire policies that are seeing the vast number of Palestinians including kids being killed, where soldiers open fire in many cases with no apparent reason, like we saw recently in Hebron of Sam Abu Haikal, the seven month old baby who was riding with his parents in their vehicle in their own city and soldiers opened fire and killed a seven month old baby."
What’s it like being an Israeli living in Israel? I ask him. He says there is almost no opposition to the use of violence whether it’s against Lebanon, Iran or the Palestinians.
“We are seeing almost no opposition to the genocide in Gaza, almost no opposition to what is happening in the West Bank and Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians in the detention centres. This is a result of the decades of a regime that is conducting apartheid in its own territory. When you are defined by the regime as the superior group and enjoy all the rights and benefit of that you lose sight of humanity, especially the humanity of the people who are inferior to you according to the regime – which are the Palestinians – and this dehumanisation that has been an ongoing process creates full indifference to human life and while it’s very sad to say that, there isn’t any opposition within Israeli society to the things I describe to you here, almost no opposition.”
He said there is not enough being done by the international community to stop the genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the torture of Palestinian prisoners.
“The difficult part is that the society that I grew up in and that I’m a part of is committing genocide and supporting genocide or is indifferent to genocide and that there is full indifference to human beings that are being treated that way by Israeli society and the Israeli government. And this is very sad to see because that is where I am from.”
