Gaza Herald_ Twelve Israeli human rights groups have issued a stark warning that the second year of the Gaza war marked “the deadliest and most ruinous year for Palestinians since 1967,” stressing in an extensive report that Israeli violations have widened on a scale never seen before, and that actions once viewed as exceptional early in the war had, by 2025, hardened into a fixed and routine policy.
The report comes from the “Platform” coalition, which brings together organizations including B’Tselem, the Civil Rights Association, HaMoked, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence, and Physicians for Human Rights. It draws on three consecutive annual assessments, from 2023 to 2025, which document a profound transformation in both the conduct of the war and Israel’s systems of domination.
According to the report, by May 2024, the death toll in Gaza had already exceeded 36,000 Palestinians before climbing in October 2025 to 67,173, including more than twenty thousand children and ten thousand women. It adds that an estimated ten thousand bodies remain buried beneath destroyed buildings, and that the number of injured has surpassed 170,000.
The organisations argue that this unparalleled surge in casualties has been accompanied by a breakdown in military restraint and increasingly extreme rhetoric from government leaders, turning the killing of civilians into a deliberate and systematic pattern rather than a collateral outcome of operations.
On displacement, the report states that more than one million Palestinians were uprooted within Gaza during 2024, but that the figure rose in 2025 to roughly 1.9 million people nearly 90% of the Strip’s residents amid total collapse of housing areas and of water, power, agricultural and hospital systems, with many families forced to flee several times in a single year. As living conditions deteriorated further, the hunger crisis shifted from UN warnings in 2024 into mass loss of life in 2025, with 13,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition in July, the UN declaring full famine in August, and 461 people dying from hunger by October, including 157 children.
The report indicates that merely trying to obtain food has become a deadly risk. No such deaths were recorded in 2024, but Israeli security actions in 2025 caused the killing of 2,306 Palestinians and the injury of 16,929 near aid-distribution points because of chaos, lack of regulation, and the use of live fire. The groups add that 2025 saw the documentation of dozens of cases where Palestinians including the elderly and minors — were used as “human shields” within Gaza, with some held bound and blindfolded for extended periods.
The report further exposes a grave escalation in settler violence across the West Bank, where attacks intensified from their already high levels in 2023–2024 to large-scale expulsions in 2025. These included the complete removal of 44 Bedouin communities and the partial emptying of 10 others, resulting in the displacement of 2,932 people, among them 1,326 children.
Meanwhile, the number of administrative detainees jumped from just over a thousand in 2023 to 3,577 in 2025. The report recorded 98 Palestinians who died in Israeli custody due to torture, denial of medical treatment, and degrading detention conditions, concluding that abuse has become “a systematic practice” across the security apparatus and prison system. In East Jerusalem, the organizations document a rapid downward spiral since 2023, with land registration used as a mechanism of dispossession, intensified movement and service restrictions, and unprecedented settlement growth, making 2025 the climactic point of Israel’s shift from institutional discrimination to a deeply entrenched policy of seizure. The deterioration extends to the heritage sphere, with major historical and archival sites, such as Qasr al-Basha, the Rafah Museum, and municipal archives — destroyed in Gaza, while archaeological areas in the West Bank and Jerusalem have been repurposed to consolidate spatial control through the expansion of settler authority, national parks and large-scale heritage projects around the Old City.
The report concludes with a severe statement: “The year 2025 revealed a reality once unimaginable, a state operating without limits, consistently breaching international law and dismantling the very principles it claims to uphold. Starvation as a weapon, assaults on hospitals, the disappearance of detainees, the uprooting of communities and the widespread killing of civilians are not mishaps but deliberate policy.
Violations, once defined as crimes against humanity, have become daily routines carried out without repercussions. Without the establishment of an independent and effective investigative mechanism, this trajectory will become permanent.”
