The UN experts say that Israel “ intentionally attacked and destroyed ” the main fertility center in the Palestinian territory.
Israel committed “genocidal acts” against Palestinians by systematically destroying women’s health establishments during his war against Gaza and using sexual violence as a war strategy, said United Nations experts.
On Thursday, the International Commission for the Independent Investigation of Geneva, based in Geneva, said in a new report that Israel “had intentionally attacked and destroyed” the main fertility center of Gaza while simultaneously blocking drugs for pregnancies, deliveries and neonatal care of entry into the ferve.
In its report, the Commission noted that the Israeli authorities “destroyed … The Palestinian reproduction capacity in Gaza as a group by the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive health care,” he said in a statement.
He added that this was equivalent to “two categories of genocidal acts” during the Israeli offensive in Gaza, launched after Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
For its part, “Israel categorically rejects untreated allegations,” said its mission in Geneva in a statement.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the United Nations investigation into “false accusations, including absurd complaints”.
“The anti-Israeli circus known as the United Nations Human Rights Council has long been exposed as an anti-Semitic, corrupt, supporting terrorism and non-relevant,” Netanyahu said in a statement published by his office on Thursday.
‘War crime to volunteer’
The report indicates that maternity and districts had been systematically destroyed in Gaza, as well as the Al-Basma IVF center, the main clinic of in vitro fertility in the territory.
He said Al-Basma was intentionally bombed in December 2023, destroying around 4,000 embryos in a clinic that served 2,000 to 3,000 patients per month.
The Commission found no credible evidence that the building was used for military purposes.
He declared that destruction “was a measure intended to prevent births among the Palestinians in Gaza, which is a genocidal act”.
Addressing Tel Aviv Tribune, the former UN humanitarian affairs coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said: “It is good that the UN is now talking about the genocide, because so far, this has been very careful about this word”.
And although he said that the evidence of the genocide was “indisputable” and that the conclusions were “expected for a long time”, he avoided saying that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the International Criminal Court (CIC) would bear the leaders of justice.
“Will it be a legally applied complaint?” I don’t think so, “he said about the report’s conclusions.
The report intervened after the commission led public hearings in Geneva on Tuesday and Wednesday, hearing victims and witnesses of sexual violence.
He concluded that Israel had directly targeted civilian women and girls, “acts that constitute crime against humanity of murder and war crime to volunteer”.
The Commission added that the stripping and nudity of the forced public, sexual harassment, including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault, include part of the “standard operational procedures” of Israeli forces towards the Palestinians.