The UN Commission of Inquiry has said Israel had “intentionally attacked and destroyed” the Palestinian territory’s main fertility centre, and had simultaneously imposed a siege and blocked aid, including medication for ensuring safe pregnancies, deliveries and neonatal care.
The commission found that Israeli occupation authorities “have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare”, it said in a statement. It said this amounted to “two categories of genocidal acts” during Israel’s war in Gaza.
Of its five categories, the inquiry said the two implicating Israel were “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”.
“These violations have not only caused severe immediate physical and mental harm and suffering to women and girls, but irreversible long-term effects on the mental health and reproductive and fertility prospects of Palestinians as a group,” the commission’s chair Navi Pillay said in a statement.
The Israeli occupation “categorically rejects” the allegations, its mission in Geneva said.
Meanwhile, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food warned that Israel is carrying out an unprecedentedly rapid campaign of starvation in Gaza, calling it “the fastest in modern history.”
“How is Israel able to starve 2.3 million people so quickly and so completely?” Michael Fakhri asked in a joint press briefing alongside other UN special rapporteurs in Geneva.
“This is the fastest starvation campaign in modern history,” Fakhri said.
As the entry of all humanitarian aid into Gaza is stopped by Israel, he said: “This is not a ceasefire by any definition. This is a slowing down of military violence, but … the unfolding of death through starvation.”
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, told the briefing that even if the bombs and violence stop in Palestine today, “the genocide will continue because there are no ways to remedy the destruction” that has been made.
Albanese also warned that “the genocidal violence is leaking out in the West Bank,” saying the violence is now “as acute as ever.”
“I don’t know how many warnings the international community will need,” she said and added: “We will miss human rights very much where they are no longer able to protect us.”
Ben Saul, the UN special rapporteur on protection of human rights, for his part, said that he denounces US President Donald Trump’s Gaza relocation plan, saying: “It would shatter the most fundamental rules of international order and the United Nations Charter since 1945.”
“It’s manifestly illegal to invade and annex foreign territory by force, to forcibly deport its population and to deprive the Palestinian people of their right to self-determination,” Saul said, underlining that any plan for the day after must be based on the popular will of the Palestinian people, including under any Arab proposal.
He also condemned Israel’s “continuing illegal military provocation in the wider region,” referring to the recent “occupation of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights and strikes to unilaterally and preventively disarm the Syrian military on the pretext of countering terrorism.
“These are additional to illegal aggressions and threats of force in Lebanon and Iran over the last year; such acts destabilise the whole region, including a peaceful transition of power in Syria,” he said. “The world’s active and passive enabling of lawlessness and impunity in Gaza and Palestine has contagiously emboldened Israel to do the same elsewhere.”
He urged all countries to unite against “coercion by global or regional powers that seeks to break the international legal system.”
Meg Satterthwaite, the UN special rapporteur on independence of judges and lawyers, said: “The US sanctions against the ICC would appear to amount to offences against the administration of justice under Article 70 of the Rome Statute.”
Article 70, Satterthwaite explained, punishes efforts to impede or intimidate an official of the court or to retaliate against an official of the court because of duties performed by that official.
“It is crucial that we call these actions out for what they are and that states stand together to oppose this attack on the international rule of law,” she emphasised.
