A photo of Benjamin Netanyahu when United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary visited January 24, 2024. (Rory Arnold/No10 Downing Street/Wikimedia Commons)
TEL AVIV - A U.N. report released Thursday accused Israel of carrying out “systematic” gender-based violence during its 17-month war in the Gaza Strip, including by shelling fertility clinics and hospital maternity wards, causing maternal deaths by blocking aid deliveries, and subjecting male and female detainees to sexual humiliation or abuse.
The 49-page report, by a U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry, said that “Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention.”
Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, quickly condemned the report’s findings as baseless.
“Instead of focusing on the crimes against humanity and the war crimes that were perpetrated by the Hamas terrorist organization in the worst massacre carried out against the Jewish People since the Holocaust, the UN has again chosen to attack the State of Israel with false accusations, including baseless accusations of sexual violence,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
A report last year by the U.N. commission that investigated killings, torture and other crimes by Hamas and affiliated Palestinian militant groups during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel found “reasonable grounds” that perpetrators had committed sexual violence. Another U.N. report, from March 2024, found “reasonable grounds to believe” that victims were subjected to rape, gang rape and other forms of gender-based violence in several locations in Israel on Oct. 7.
The report released Thursday focused in part on what the United Nations said was an intentional attack by Israeli forces on the Basma IVF clinic in Gaza, the enclave’s main fertility center, in December 2023. The attack destroyed about 4,000 cryogenically frozen embryos, along with 1,000 sperm samples and unfertilized eggs.
The report’s authors said they did not “find any evidence that this IVF clinic was a legitimate military target at the time that it was attacked” by Israeli forces, adding that they concluded that “the destruction of the Basma IVF clinic was a measure intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza.”
Israeli violations cited in the reported included the “forced public nudity and stripping” of Palestinian men and boys; the sexual assault of detainees in Israeli custody; and the willful killings of civilians - which, taken together, “form part of the [Israeli military’s] standard operating procedures towards Palestinians,” the report said.
Attacks on “healthcare facilities offering sexual and reproductive healthcare services have impacted about 540,000 women and girls of reproductive age in Gaza,” the report said.
Israel’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva, in a lengthy rebuttal released Thursday in response to the commission’s report, said the Israeli military has “concrete directives, procedures, orders, and policies” that prevented the kind of misconduct the report described, adding that allegations of sexual violence were investigated in line with international norms.
Earlier this month, during a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, Israel halted aid deliveries and cut electricity to a desalination plant in the enclave, saying the move was intended to pressure Hamas into accepting an extension of the recent ceasefire and to release the dozens of hostages the militant group still holds. Aid agencies have called for an immediate resumption of relief supplies, warning of further hardship for Palestinian civilians after nearly a year and a half of war.
“Israel’s decision to suspend all aid and goods from entering Gaza is already depriving families of food and medicine. Over the last week the costs of essential goods in the market, including produce, flour, and oil, has more than doubled,” Kate Phillips-Barrasso of the humanitarian aid group Mercy Corps said in a statement Thursday.
“Gaza cannot afford a return to war,” she said. “Millions of lives are at stake.”
