UN Report Accuses Israel of War Crimes, Israel Denies Allegations
A United Nations-backed commission has accused Israel of committing “genocidal acts” against Palestinians in Gaza, citing the systematic destruction of women’s health care facilities and the use of sexual violence as a war tactic. The report followed two days of public hearings in Geneva.
Israel rejected the findings as biased and unsubstantiated.
The UN commission stated in its report that Israeli forces deliberately targeted and destroyed Gaza’s primary fertility center while enforcing a blockade that deprived women of medical aid needed for safe pregnancies and childbirth. These actions, the report said, amounted to attempts to partially destroy “the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza,” a category of genocide under international law. The commission also accused Israeli forces of using forced public stripping and sexual violence against Palestinian detainees.
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Israel’s mission to the UN in Geneva dismissed the report, calling it a politically motivated attempt to incriminate the Israeli military. It maintained that Israeli policies explicitly forbid such misconduct and that the military’s internal review mechanisms comply with international standards.
In a response to the report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the UN Human Rights Council, which established the commission, as an “antisemitic, rotten and irrelevant organization that supports terrorism.”
“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 his statement. “This is not a human rights council; it is a blood rights council.”
Long-standing tensions between Israel and the UN are at a high, with Israel facing multiple investigations, war crimes allegations, and a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, along with scrutiny from UN human rights bodies over its military actions in Gaza.
