Israel’s systemic assaults on ladies’s healthcare in Gaza quantity to “genocidal acts”, and Israeli safety forces have used sexual violence as a weapon of battle 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 unbiased worldwide fee of inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, together with East Jerusalem, and introduced to the UN human rights council.
It particulars assaults on maternity wards and different healthcare services for ladies, the destruction of an IVF clinic and controls on the entry of meals and medical provides into Gaza that collectively “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 stated.
The report discovered that Israel’s safety forces had made sure types of sexual and gender-based violence a part of “standard operating procedures”, together with compelled public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment together with threats of rape, and sexual assault.
The “pattern of sexual violence” that Israeli forces used, together with circumstances of rape and sexualised torture, represent battle crimes and crimes towards humanity, the UN stated.
“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 navy management offered “either explicit orders or implicit encouragement” to hold out sexual violence together with rape and assaults on genitals, the UN stated.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, stated the accusations within the report had been baseless, and attacked the UN human rights council as biased towards Israel.
A earlier fee report investigated sexual and gender-based violence dedicated by Hamas and different armed Palestinian teams throughout the 7 October 2023 assaults, when about 1200 individuals had been killed, the vast majority of them civilians, and 250 taken hostage to Gaza.
The most recent report paperwork a variety of violations towards Palestinian males, ladies and kids throughout the occupied territories within the wake of that assault.
Repeated patterns within the abuse of Palestinian boys and males reveals the violence was supposed as collective punishment, to “humiliate and intimidate”, the report discovered. This included filming and photographing public stripping, nudity and sexualised abuse and torture, and sharing photographs on-line.
Most perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence listed within the report had been members of the armed forces or working in detention centres, however additionally they included Israeli settlers focusing on Palestinians.
The chair of the fee which drew up the report, Navi Pillay, stated Israel’s failure to analyze or prosecute abuses created a tradition of impunity.
Israel final month sentenced a soldier to seven months for extreme assaults of Palestinian detainees, the primary conviction for abuse within the detention system. 9 different troopers had been arrested final yr over allegations of sexual abuse so violent it left a detainee in a essential situation, however they haven’t gone on trial.
Pillay stated: “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 worldwide court docket of justice ordered the Israeli authorities to make sure its forces didn’t commit acts of genocide towards Palestinians in Gaza in January 2024.
Israel is celebration to the genocide conference, however not the Rome statue, underneath which the worldwide legal court docket has jurisdiction to rule on particular person legal circumstances involving genocide.
The UN report additionally highlighted the “unprecedented scale” of feminine deaths in Gaza as one other gendered side of the violence. Israeli assaults have killed greater than 48,000 individuals in Gaza, 33% of them ladies and ladies.
That may be a larger proportion than throughout Israel’s previous wars in Gaza, brought on by “an Israeli strategy of deliberately targeting residential buildings and using heavy explosives in densely populated areas”, the report stated.
Egypt and Hamas officers on Thursday welcomed feedback from Donald Trump that Palestinians wouldn’t be compelled out of Gaza. “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians from Gaza,” the US president stated after a White Home assembly with the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin.
Trump has repeatedly referred to as for the US to take possession of the strip and rebuild it as a “riviera” for the Center East with out its Palestinian residents, suggesting they need to transfer to neighbouring nations together with Egypt.
