A prominent international rights group has taken the lid off Israel’s cruelty toward Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

“Israeli security forces have unlawfully used lethal force in fatal shootings of Palestinians in the West Bank,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a new report based on the documentation of several cases.

According to HRW, research into eight deaths in four incidents between July 2022 and October 2023 concluded that “Israeli forces wrongfully fatally shot or deliberately executed Palestinians who posed no apparent security threat”.

“Israeli security forces are not just unlawfully killing Palestinians in Gaza, but have been killing Palestinians without a legal basis in the West Bank, including deliberately executing Palestinians who posed no apparent threat,” said Richard Weir, senior crisis and conflict researcher at HRW.

“These killings are taking place at a level without recent precedent in an environment in which Israeli forces have no need to fear that their government will hold them accountable,” he added.

Israeli forces in 2023 killed 492 Palestinians, including 120 children, in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem(al-Quds), according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). That figure is more than twice as many as in any other year since the UN began systematically documenting fatalities, said HRW.