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Israel’s systemic attacks on women’s healthcare in Gaza amount to “genocidal acts”, and Israeli security forces have used sexual violence as a weapon of war to “dominate and destroy the Palestinian people”, a UN report states.
The 49-page report on sexual and gender-based violence was drawn up by the UN’s independent international commission of inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and presented to the UN human rights council.
It details attacks on maternity wards and other healthcare facilities for women, the destruction of an IVF clinic and controls on the entry of food and medical supplies into Gaza that together “destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group”.
Israel’s actions amounted to “two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome statute and the genocide convention, including deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians and imposing measures intended to prevent births”, the UN human rights council said.
The report found that Israel’s security forces had made certain forms of sexual and gender-based violence part of “standard operating procedures”, including forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, and sexual assault.
The “pattern of sexual violence” that Israeli forces used, including cases of rape and sexualised torture, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, the UN said.
“The frequency, prevalence and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated across the Occupied Palestinian Territory leads the commission to conclude that sexual and gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilise, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people.”
Israel’s civilian and military leadership provided “either explicit orders or implicit encouragement” to carry out sexual violence including rape and attacks on genitals, the UN said.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the accusations in the report were baseless, and attacked the UN human rights council as biased against Israel.
A previous commission report investigated sexual and gender-based violence committed by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups during the 7 October 2023 attacks, when about 1200 people were killed, the majority of them civilians, and 250 taken hostage to Gaza.
The latest report documents a wide range of violations against Palestinian men, women and children across the occupied territories in the wake of that attack.
Repeated patterns in the abuse of Palestinian boys and men shows the violence was intended as collective punishment, to “humiliate and intimidate”, the report found. This included filming and photographing public stripping, nudity and sexualised abuse and torture, and sharing images online.
Most perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence listed in the report were members of the armed forces or working in detention centres, but they also included Israeli settlers targeting Palestinians.
The chair of the commission which drew up the report, Navi Pillay, said Israel’s failure to investigate or prosecute abuses created a culture of impunity.
Israel last month sentenced a soldier to seven months for severe assaults of Palestinian detainees, the first conviction for abuse in the detention system. Nine other soldiers were arrested last year over allegations of sexual abuse so violent it left a detainee in a critical condition, but they have not gone on trial.
Pillay said: “The exculpatory statements and actions by Israeli leaders and the lack of effectiveness shown by the military justice system to prosecute cases and convict perpetrators send a clear message to members of the Israeli security forces that they can continue committing such acts without fear of accountability.
“In this context, accountability through the international criminal court and national courts, through their domestic law or exercising universal jurisdiction, is essential if the rule of law is to be upheld and victims awarded justice.”
The international court of justice ordered the Israeli government to ensure its forces did not commit acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza in January 2024.
Israel is party to the genocide convention, but not the Rome statue, under which the international criminal court has jurisdiction to rule on individual criminal cases involving genocide.
The UN report also highlighted the “unprecedented scale” of female deaths in Gaza as another gendered aspect of the violence. Israeli attacks have killed more than 48,000 people in Gaza, 33% of them women and girls.
That is a higher proportion than during Israel’s past wars in Gaza, caused by “an Israeli strategy of deliberately targeting residential buildings and using heavy explosives in densely populated areas”, the report said.
Egypt and Hamas officials on Thursday welcomed comments from Donald Trump that Palestinians would not be forced out of Gaza. “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians from Gaza,” the US president said after a White House meeting with the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin.
Trump has repeatedly called for the US to take ownership of the strip and rebuild it as a “riviera” for the Middle East without its Palestinian residents, suggesting they should move to neighbouring countries including Egypt.
