By. Ashoka Peiris
A new United Nations report has accused Israel of carrying out “systematic” gender-based violence during its 17-month war in the Gaza Strip.
They point to reasons for this, including shelling of fertility clinics and hospital maternity wards, blocking aid deliveries, causing maternal deaths, and sexually humiliating or abusing male and female detainees.
The 49-page report released on Friday, by a UN 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.”
This kind of reports, Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, quickly condemned the report’s findings as baseless.
Furthermore, “Instead of focusing on the crimes against humanity and the war crimes that were perpetrated by the Hamas terrorist organisation 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.
However, a report last year by the UN commission that investigated killings, torture and other crimes by Hamas and affiliated Palestinian militant groups during the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel found “reasonable grounds” that perpetrators had committed sexual violence.
The latest report focused in part on what the United Nations said that was an intentional attack by Israeli forces on the Al Basma IVF (In vitro fertilisation-IVF) clinic in Gaza, the enclave’s main fertility centre, in December 2023. Under this circumstance, the attack has destroyed about 4000 cryogenically frozen embryos, along with 1000 sperm samples and unfertilised 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 wilful 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,” furthermore the report said.
Israel’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva, in a lengthy rebuttal in response to the commission’s report, said the Israeli military had “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.