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The Israeli military has systematically committed sexual, reproductive, and other gender-based violence in its siege of Gaza, including attacks so horrific that they amount to “genocidal acts” against Palestinians, a new UN report has found.
The report by an independent UN human rights commission released Thursday finds that Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s sexual and reproductive health care capacity across Gaza in its assault, while also committing widespread acts of sexual violence, including rape and violence to the genitals, against Palestinians. While Gaza was subjected to the worst attacks, Israeli forces and settlers have also carried out such acts in the occupied West Bank, the report says.
The UN experts lay out a wide swath of evidence of sexual violence against Palestinians, which the commission finds has escalated drastically amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“There is no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination,” said Navi Pillay, who heads the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which prepared the report.
Their findings include horrific accounts of Israeli soldiers posting pictures and videos of Palestinians who they forced to strip on social media, as well as threats of sexual assault and forced public nudity. The report also includes accounts of rape and sexual assault both in and out of Israel’s torture camps, with some attacks so violent that the victim needed medical care as a result.
Such sexual violence was committed with supervision from top Israeli officials, the commission found, or was carried out under explicit orders from military and civilian leadership.
The report also details how Israel has targeted and annihilated Palestinians’ reproductive abilities — an act of genocide, the report says, meant to prevent births amid the targeted population. Specifically, Israel’s intentional bombing of Al-Basma IVF Center in December 2023, which destroyed 4,000 embryos, was “was done with the intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, in whole or in part,” the report says.
“Women and girls have also died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities impacting access to reproductive health care, acts that amount to the crime against humanity of extermination,” the report says.
The destruction of reproductive health care in Gaza will have “irreversible long-term effects” on the Palestinian population’s prospects for reproduction, Pillay said.
The commission adds that Israel’s near-total humanitarian aid blockade and starvation campaign especially affected pregnant people, post-partum people, and babies, further compromising reproductive health and the survival of future generations of Palestinians.
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