The United Nations is accusing Israel of "genocidal acts" and using sexual violence as part of its strategy in Gaza, in a new report published about the devastating war.
The panel of experts have highlighted the destruction of Gaza's main IVF clinic, attacks on maternity and female health facilities across the strip, and restricting access to medication as evidence of crimes against humanity.
The report from the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel also said it had been presented with evidence and testimony of rape and sexual assault against Palestinians during the course of the war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the findings, labelling the accusations as false, biased and antisemitic.
"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," the report said.
"The harm for pregnant, lactating and new mothers is of an unprecedented scale in Gaza.
"Furthermore, the lack of access to sexual and reproductive health care has caused immediate physical and mental harm and suffering to women and girls that will have irreversible long-term effects on the mental health and the physical reproductive and fertility prospects of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group."
The commission said there had been a "large increase in sexual and gender-based crimes" by Israeli forces against Palestinians since the start of the war, "intended to retaliate and punish them collectively" for Hamas' deadly attacks on Israel on October 7 2023.
"Palestinian men and boys have been subjected to specific persecutory acts intended to punish them collectively," the report said.
"The way in which these often-sexual acts are committed, including their filming, photographing and dissemination online … shows that forced public stripping and nudity, as well as sexualised torture and ill-treatment, are part of the persecutory attack against men and boys committed to punish, humiliate and intimidate Palestinian men and boys into subjugation."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted angrily to the report, taking aim at the United Nations for publishing the accusations.
"The anti-Israel circus known as the UN 'Human Rights Council' has long been revealed as an antisemitic, rotten and irrelevant organisation that supports terrorism," he said in a statement.
"For good reason Israel decided to quit it approximately one month ago.
"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."
The UN report said the prevalence of such conduct showed sexual violence was "part of the [Israeli Security Forces] standard operating procedures towards Palestinians."
"The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] has concrete directives, procedures, orders and policies which unequivocally prohibit such misconduct," Israel's permanent mission to the United Nations said in a statement.
UN says no evidence of IVF clinic was a 'military target'
The UN highlighted the shelling of the Al-Basma IVF centre in December 2023, where it says 4,000 embryos were destroyed, along with 1,000 sperm samples and unfertilised eggs.
The facility, according to the report, served around 2,000 to 3,000 patients a month.
"The Commission did not find any evidence that this IVF clinic was a legitimate military target at the time that it was attacked by the ISF," the report said.
"The Commission concludes that the destruction of the Basma IVF clinic was a measure intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza, which is a genocidal act under the Rome Statute and Genocide Convention.
"The Commission also concludes that this was done with the intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, in whole or in part, and that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question."
Testimony to the inquiry on the treatment of Palestinian prisoners and detainees included graphic accounts of sexual assault.
"Male detainees reported that ISF personnel had beaten, kicked, pulled or squeezed their genitals, often while they were naked," the report said.
"The Commission verified four such cases.
"In some cases, ISF personnel used objects such as metal detectors and batons to beat them while they were naked."
Among the cases cited was the alleged abuse of one Palestinian, which has resulted in charges being laid against five Israeli soldiers.
Israel's mission to the UN in Geneva accused the inquiry of using sexual violence to "advance" its agenda, casting doubt on the veracity of the evidence it was presented.
"In a shameless attempt to incriminate the IDF and manufacture the illusion of 'systematic' use of [sexual and gender based violence], the [inquiry] deliberately adopts a lower level of corroboration in its report, which allowed it to include information from second-hand single uncorroborated sources," it said in a statement.
"This means that Israeli forces are subject to an entirely different standard than any other actor — any unsubstantiated information supported the [inquiry's] predetermined narrative is deemed credible, even if not verified.
"Indeed, the [inquiry] applied different standards in its June 2024 determinations on the use od sexual violence by Hamas on October 7th, where only corroborated information was presented."
Israel is a signatory to the international genocide convention.
It is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which recognises the International Criminal Court as having jurisdiction to prosecute allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
