Oxfam Australia Media Release
More Palestinians killed by Israeli military and settlers across occupied West Bank in last 3 years since Gaza hostilities than previous 17 combined.
More than one in five killed over last 20 years were children.
More Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military and settlers across the occupied West Bank in the last three years than in the previous 17 years combined, analysis from Oxfam has found. The number of children killed over the last three years was also higher.
An analysis of United Nations data found that 1,036 Palestinians – including 225 children – had been killed by Israeli forces or settlers between 2006 and the end of 2022. However, in the last three years, from 2023 to the end of last year by comparison, 1,244 Palestinians – including 268 children – have been killed.
Over the 20 years, 22 per cent – more than one in five of those killed – have been children.
For the same periods analysed, in the 17 years between 2006 until the end of 2022, 86 Israeli settlers, including 12 children, were killed by Palestinians. In the last three years – from 2023 to the end of 2025 – 43 Israeli settlers have been killed, including ten children.
The West Bank continues to be subjected to Israeli policies and practices of fast-tracked annexation, amid record mass forced displacement, movement restrictions, killings by army and settler militias, and ongoing military operations. Checkpoints and closures are fragmenting the territory and limiting access to essential services and livelihoods, while repeated state-backed settler violence is driving mass displacement.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam International Humanitarian Policy Lead said: “The mounting killing of civilians in the West Bank is tragic and horrifying. While the eyes of the world have been on Gaza, attacks in the West Bank have been accelerating. Since the atrocities committed by Hamas and other armed groups in 2023, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza while also enabling an unprecedented surge of violence across the West Bank.
“Oxfam works with Palestinian families whose lives have been destroyed. It is devastating that scores of children are being killed. This is the human cost of impunity, Israeli violence and cruelty in full view, while world leaders look the other way”.
A record number of Palestinians in the West Bank – nearly 46,000 – have been forcibly displaced over the last three years, compared to just over 13,000 for the previous 14 years combined by Israeli military operations, settler violence, demolitions and access restrictions. Many families are having to live in unstable and insecure conditions, often with host communities or in informal shelter arrangements, with limited access to essential services.
Saed* is 50 years old and was forced out of his home in the Ein Samya community. He said: “We used to deal with settlers all the time, but over the past three years, settler violence has increased massively. Eventually we had to leave and now a settler is staying in my home. I saw him. He took over the community too. It breaks my heart to talk about the past.
“We went to another community in Jericho, but it did not stop there. Settlers closed the roads, carried weapons, harassed and terrified our children on their way to school, and grazed their livestock inside our community, next to our houses. In the worst cases they would steal our livestock under the protection of the army and police.”
Communities across the West Bank have experienced repeated demolitions and destruction not just of their homes but water pipelines, animal shelters and trees. Last year, the World Health Organisation documented over 230 attacks on healthcare facilities, including obstructed access, the vandalization of ambulances and harassment of medical staff.
There is now a record 925 obstacles that permanently or intermittently restrict the movement of over 3 million Palestinians across the West Bank including East Jerusalem. This is 43 per cent more than the annual average of 647 movement obstacles in the preceding 20 years.
In the first three months of this year alone there have been more than 540 settler attacks, 33 Palestinian people killed and more than 2,200 people displaced. More than 60 water and sanitation structures have been vandalized, including pipelines, irrigation systems and water tanks, which have undermined access to water in 32 Palestinian communities.
Despite Israel’s ongoing process of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Oxfam and its partners continue to support vulnerable communities across the West Bank with humanitarian assistance, including clean water, food, the rehabilitation of agricultural water cisterns and livestock shelters.
Oxfam is calling for an end to Israel’s unlawful occupation and further annexation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to the foreign complicity in the illegal occupation and settlement enterprise. A just and sustainable peace must be anchored in international law and the right to self-determination.
Previous Media Releases from Oxfam
Richest 1% burn through their annual carbon limit in just 10 days
Disease ripping through Gaza as Israel continues to deliberately block aid
Oxfam reaction to the Gaza IPC hunger figures
Oxfam responds to mass forced displacement in Lebanon and ready to respond to wider regional crisis
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Time for Australia to take a stand against these self-serving ZION@ZIs who currently reside in Australia by exporting them all to any other country that will take them, or the North Pole.
Zionism is a 19th century Viennese cult dedicated to finding a safe geographic location for practicing Judaism followers to practice their religion, after a millennium of persecution across Europe. It has subsumed Judaism to mask the vicious assassination practices of the Holocaust against Indigenous Palestinians, Lebanese and Indigenous landowners in the Occupied West Bank Territories without accountability, thanks to the complicity of the Israeli Knesset of ZION@ZI politicians led by Butcher Bibi and the amoral IDF.
From the very beginning the Zionist movement was talking of displacing the Palestinian.
The idea of the expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs was mooted ever since the beginnings of political Zionism and it was envisaged that emigration would proceed voluntarily. Thus, in his diary entry for June 12, 1895, Theodore Herzl (1860-1904) wrote that divesting Arabs of ownership must proceed in an appropriate manner, adding: “We shall strive to tranfer the poorer inhabitants to the other side of the frontier by finding them employment in the lands that receive them, but deny them any employment in our land. But this operation of divesting these poor people of their ownership and resettling them elsewhere must proceed without violence and with caution.” In May 1911, the head of the Palestine Bureau of the Zionist Organization Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), suggested in a letter addressed to the Executive Committee of the Zionist Organization a limited transfer of Palestinian Arabs to Syria where the Zionists were purchasing land in Aleppo and Homs in northern Syria on which to settle Palestinian farmers who were bereft of their lands in Palestine. In March 1930, Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) called for seizing lands east of the Jordanto settle Arab Palestinians upon them, further suggesting the formation of a “development company” to own lands capable of absorbing the Palestinian Arabs to be removed there. In an article published in “Doar Hayom” on April 28, 1930, Ussishkin argued that expulsion was the only viable option in the long term since “ours is a nobler and greater aim than to keep a few hundred thousand farmers on their lands.” When the Peel Commission adopted in its report in July 1937 the concept of population exchange, that concept gained further currency among Zionist leaders. At the Twentieth Zionist Congress held in Munich in August 1937, most delegates accepted the Peel Plan and Arthur Ruppin declared: “We must prepare the ground for receiving them in some Arab country, on land suitable for farming. Only then can we strive to move them there, voluntarily if possible. But if no other way exists, we shall be compelled to divest them of ownership, for otherwise we would have to grant equal rights to the substantial Arab minority in the Jewish state.” In a speech delivered at that Congress by David Ben Gurion on August 7, 1937, he dealt with the issue of transfer but the official minutes blocked a passage later revealed in Zionist archives which went: “We must carefully analyze the question of transfer and must ask if this is possible, necessary, moral and beneficial…In many parts of this country, the Yishuv will not survive if Arab farmers are not made to leave. The Peel Commission examined this issue with care, and it is of the utmost importance that this concept was raised by the Commission, and not by us…The transfer of the Arab inhabitants is what will permit the implementation of an intensive program of Jewish settlement, and it is fortunate that the Arab peoples possess vast and uninhabited lands.”
The leaders of Zionism regarded the removal of the Arab inhabitants, voluntarily or else by force, if necessary, to be a fundamental tenet of Zionism. Thus, Berl Katznelson wrote: “We are in favor of an emigration acceptable to those concerned and an agreed settlement between the two peoples. But since such a settlement is impossible, the only way to remove them is to resort to force.” Forcible removal as an idea became entrenched following the creation of the Irgun terrorist group in the Spring of 1931, led by Avraham Tihumi, which carried out a wide campaign of violence against the Palestinians prior, to denying legitimacy to the British presence in Palestine. The group then moved against the British following the 1939 White Paper, and finally declaring a revolt against them in February 1944, the group now led by Menachem Begin. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1656628
Please note: the emphasis is mine, made to shorten the reading.
Appalling and Oxfam is correct in highlighting, but others conflicts too that Oxfam covers?
Other indie outlets are framing the Mid East, Europe etc., like the RW MSM, via the US and/Oz tankie grifters, who like the right blame the local centre (for everything)? Evidence of how successful the Koch Heritage and Evangelicals’ Project Esther has been in pummeling the centre?
However, while the focus is upon victims, some local indie media contributors seem to think they are the victims; narcissistic transference? Meanwhile ignoring or disappearing the complicity of Israeli and Hamas leadership (plus Qatar & Arab nations) in causing grief for Palestinian civilians?
Oxfam Sweden estimated 10K+ civilians victims in Ukraine early ’22 and not including the 10k+ children who have been ‘evacuated’ to Russia; plus thousands of both since?
One indie outlet presumably got feedback on being too micro focused on the Mid East, to then produce quantitative time interval analysis to conclude for that (non) random time interval there were more Gazan than Ukraine victims, therefore they can ignore Ukraine (and other conflicts)?
Another person locally, viewed as an expert on the Mid East from the anti-imperialist left, but….. linked to a US institute sponsored by arms manufacturers and fossil fuels overpopulated with white Christian conservative colleagues?
How easy is it to astroturf lazy Australians whose tyranny of distance makes for less or qualifed empathy?
Canguro, long may you live,
I read a book by Sim Kern: Genocide Bad. At one stage she was driven to answer that question: why were the Jews hated?
She is a fiction writer, not a historian, but she is a lesbian Jew, so she’s experienced plenty and all sorts of bigotry.
She gave big wraps to a book by Joshua Trachtenberg: Jewish magic and superstition: A study in folk religion. He laid out the role of magic and superstition in Medieval thinking along the lines of cause and effect. That is, if something bad happened, as like you got sick it was the work of demons and the like.
Christian medicine at that time was a load of shit. There was no distinction between medicine and magic. So, Jews’ reputation for sorcery was one reason they were particularly sought-after as physicians. They tended to have proficiency in more than one language, travelled a lot and studied abroad, all of which conspired to make them, at least in the eyes of non-Jews more effective practitioners than their non-Jewish competitors. They were sought out for their supposed expertise in exorcism and healing.
Christian church leaders did not like members of their flock going to Jews (or anyone else for that matter) for help on spiritual matters. How could the church wield cosmic authority over people’s lives if the people were in practice going to the Jews for help. So, the Christian church started the mother of all smear campaigns.
She said that from about 400 CE, the Christian church proclaimed, not that Jewish magic didn’t work, but rather that Jewish, Pagan and Christian Heretic magic was a Satanic Pact. Jews became synonymous with witches and black magic, their rituals such as Jewish sabbath were daubed with labels of Satanic rites.
From there things snowballed including the “blood libel”. Then whenever Europeans were looking for a scapegoat, those black magic dealing Jews were the obvious target.
I don’t know whether that’s true or not, she may have a bias on this topic, I did leave out a few of the things she had to say about the Christian church in Medieval times as I’d rather not get into a heated debated on theological history with some angry Christian, but at least it sounds plausible to me.
As for the money-grubber, gold-obsessed, hard-hearted schemer stereotypes Sim said that the Catholic church forbade usury – the charging of interest on a loan – for reasons of Jesus overturning the moneylender tables and all that sort of stuff. Christians took that seriously in Medieval times, but there were times when Christians needed quick cash.
So, the Christian elite permitted the Jews to practice usury and take advantage of their services. The church also was quick to condemn them whenever someone was unable to meet their debt commitment, and the moneylender came for a pound of flesh. Since usury was forbade the Jews had to use skullduggery in plain sight, such as running a cloth shop and issuing notes of purchase of fictious cloth instead of taking an IOU as the IOU would be illegal.
Christian elites also weren’t going to get their own hands dirty collecting taxes, so they used Jews to do so. Jews became the face of the tax collector, even though the actual taxes were handed over to the Christian elite in return for a salary.
So, if she’s right where would that leave Jews? The shifty shopkeepers using their shop to illegally lend money, the face of tax collecting and copping it whenever something went pear-shaped for a Christian, which was probably pretty often.
Again, I don’t know if that is true or not, but it sounds more plausible than stealing, cheating and whatever is in their genes.
Thommo:
From all my reading, what you have said pretty well covers it. A handy, easily identifiable scapegoat. One aspect that needs emphasis is that when religious and/or political leaders instigated another pogrom, all the wealth so carefully compiled by members of the Jewish communities was “confiscated” (stolen). Regardless of its origins, its subsequent possession by good ol’ christians made that wealth acceptable.
Thanks Thommo, for clarifying some of these questions. Being a softy, it almost makes me feel a bit of pity for the poor bastards, but then… hah!… reality kicks in.
I was aware though, that around ~300-400 CE, the Christian church elites started clamping down: Gnostics were proscribed, as were the significant cohort of believers who were using psychedelic fungi as an aide-mémoire or adjunct tool to bring them into a deeper experience of the numinous, as detailed in the book The Psychedelic Gospels, coauthored by the American anthropologist Jerry Brown and his wife, and subtitled ‘The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity.’
Brown & his wife made extensive investigations of early medieval churches in England and Europe and were able to detail numerous examples of carvings, iconography, murals and paintings and other imagery depicting the use of psychedelic fungi. Rosslyn Chapel in the village of Roslin in Midlothian, Scotland; the Chapel of Plaincourault, Mérigny in central France; Church of Saint Martin de Vicq, Nohant-Vic, France; Chartres Cathedral; Abbey of Eichstätt in Bavaria, Germany; Basilica of Aquileia, Italy; Dark Church, Goreme, Turkey amongst a long list of early churches where these types of references to the use of fungi in spiritual practice can be found. The early Catholic hierarchy issued an edict banning the use of these agents on pain of death and so, as they do, the practice went underground.
Ieefe,
there was another part of that discourse in her book about Catholic nuns. It went along the lines of originally nuns were not just a normal part of society, they owned farms, were well-off financially and had a certain sway in societal matters.
The Catholic church ran short of funds, and the male Catholic elite had the nuns imprisoned in prisons, that they called convents, and took all their wealth for their own.
Again, I don’t know if it’s true, she may have a bias against Christians; as she grew up, one day they’re her best playmates the next day and thereafter, they’re calling her a stinking Jew.
But that story of the nuns I found interesting.
Canguro,
there was one thing I didn’t address and that was supremacy.
The Zionist movement is a supremacist movement, always has been. But I would be extremely confident that it would be fair to say that Europe was supremacist in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The Zionist movement had its roots in Europe.
Otherism is such a powerful influence on people. You’re probably aware of the Stanford prison experiment.
“In 1971, 24 young male volunteers were randomly assigned to the roles of “inmates” and “guards” in a pretend prison in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology department.
The situation quickly got out of control. By day two, the volunteers playing the role of guards had begun psychologically torturing their prisoners.
Stripped naked, hooded, chained, and denied food and sleep, the prisoners became traumatised, with half suffering nervous breakdowns so that by day six the experiment – planned to last two weeks – was called off.” https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/news/98029-the-infamous-stanford-prison-experiment-was-flawed-%E2%80%93-so-why-is-it-still-so-influential-today%3F
Even though this article argues the experiment was flawed because the guards were coached, one might argue that governments and media ‘coach’ people as well. For instance, I would argue the police were wound up and unleashed on the peaceful anti-Herzog- antigenocide protesters.
Andrew hits on a very important point.
It is the indie media that has not forsaken the Palestinian people.
Whereas the mainstream media has buried news from Gaza and the West Bank. The reason for it is all too clearly the influence of the Israel lobby.
Yep, it’s called Genocide.