UN says 2022 could be deadliest year for Palestinians in West Bank

The UN Mideast envoy said 2022 is on course to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the UN started tracking fatalities in 2005, and he called for immediate action to calm “an explosive situation” and move toward renewing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Tor Wennesland told the UN Security Council that “mounting hopelessness, anger and tension have once again erupted into a deadly cycle of violence that is increasingly difficult to contain,” and “too many people, overwhelmingly Palestinian have been killed and injured.”

In a grim assessment, the special coordinator for the Middle East peace process said the downward spiral in the West Bank and current volatile situation stem from decades of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, the prolonged absence of negotiations, and the failure to resolve key issues fuelling the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Wennesland said his message to Palestinian officials and factions, Israeli officials and the international community in recent weeks has been clear: “The immediate priority is to work to calm the situation and reverse the negative trends on the ground” but the goal must be “to empower and strengthen the Palestinian Authority and build towards a return to a political process.”

In the past month, the UN envoy said 32 Palestinians including six children were killed by Israeli security forces and 311 injured during demonstrations, clashes, search-and-arrest operations and attacks.

Two Israeli forces personnel were killed and 25 Israeli civilians were injured by Palestinians during shooting and ramming attacks, clashes, the throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails and other incidents during the same period, he said.

Wennesland said the month saw “a spike in fatal violence” that has 2022 on track to be the deadliest in the West Bank.

More than 125 Palestinians have been killed as a result of deadly Israeli raids and attacks in the West Bank and east Jerusalem this year. Israel says it launched the raids in response to a series of Palestinian attacks which killed 19 people in Israel in the spring. 

The ongoing deadly Israeli raids in the West Bank pose a serious challenge to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian Authority security forces continue to cooperate with Israel, but this cooperation is now even more unpopular than before among Palestinians, who continue to be persecuted, attacked and killed under Israel’s open-ended occupation of the West Bank, now in its 56th year.

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war and has built more than 130 settlements there in violation of international law. Many of these settlements resemble small towns, with luxurious amenities, while Palestinians in the territory suffer from Israeli restrictions, attacks and closures.

The Palestinians want the West Bank to form the main part of their future state.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN ambassador, delivered an impassioned address to the Security Council on Friday, saying: “Our people, our children, our youth are being killed, and they will not die in vain.”

“What happens next is your responsibility,” he told council members. “We knocked on every door, searched for any avenue leading to freedom and dignity, justice and redress, shared peace and security.”

Yet, Mansour said that 75 years after the British partition of Palestine, its people are still waiting “for their turn to be free,” and he accused Israel of “trying to destroy the state of Palestine.”

The Palestinian ambassador challenged the Security Council to protect and promote the two-state solution, and he raised a series of questions that allude to the possibility of a decades-long fight for freedom if necessary, and possible legal action at the International Court of Justice on Israel’s occupation.

“Either we live side by side, or I fear we might die side by side,” Mansour said of Israel. “Help us live. … Our people will not disappear, they will not renege their national identity, they will not accept subjugation. The Palestinian people will be free.”

Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan accused the Palestinians of promoting “a message of false victimhood, lies of oppression and fictions of aggression.”

At the General Assembly last month ,Abbas launched a campaign for full membership at the United Nations. Palestine is currently a non-member observer state at the UN.