Rights group Amnesty International has accused Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank and making the Palestinian territory's formal annexation a policy goal.
"Over the past three and a half years, Israeli authorities have accelerated a state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, uprooting, dispossessing and forcibly transferring Palestinian communities," said Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnes Callamard in a statement issued Wednesday following the release of a report.
The human rights organization said the attacks were not the work of a few "bad apples."
"Settler violence is a core component of a state-sanctioned campaign of ethnic cleansing, central to maintaining Israel’s system of apartheid," it said.
A report by the U.N. human rights office had previously warned in March of war crimes being committed in the West Bank. The significantly expanded settler activities indicated coordinated actions and a policy of mass displacement, it said.
