Israeli attacks on Gaza reproductive health centres 'genocidal'

Forces systematically destroyed network of care for pregnant women and newborns, UN commission finds

People pray over bodies after Palestinian civil defence workers uncovered corpses buried in the grounds of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza city on Thursday. AFP

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Israel carried out “genocidal” acts in Gaza with the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare centres during its war against Hamas, a UN investigation concluded on Thursday.

Forces “simultaneously imposed a siege and prevented humanitarian assistance, including the provision of necessary medication and equipment to ensure safe pregnancies, deliveries and post-partum and neonatal care”, the UN Commission of Inquiry said in a report.

“Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities,” it said.

The commission said such acts violate women’s and girls’ reproductive rights, as well as their right to life, health, human dignity, physical and mental integrity, freedom from torture and degrading treatment.

The report came after the commission conducted public hearings in Geneva on Tuesday and Wednesday, hearing from victims and witnesses of sexual violence.

The commission said it found that Israeli authorities have partly destroyed the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza by attacking sexual and reproductive health care.

It said that this amounts 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”.

Al Basma IVF Centre, Gaza's largest fertility clinic, was struck by an Israeli shell in December 2023, 'reportedly destroying around 4,000 embryos', according to a UN inquiry report. Reuters

“The targeting of reproductive healthcare facilities, including through direct attacks on maternity wards and Gaza’s main in-vitro fertility clinic, combined with the use of starvation as a method of war, has impacted all aspects of reproduction,” said the commission's chair Navi Pillay.

“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.”

Hamas, which led the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, sparking the war in Gaza, said the commission's report "highlighted the state of disregard and negligence that the international community has demonstrated in response to the crimes and violations committed against the Palestinians, which all require a serious position to be taken by the whole world and the UN".

"We call on the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, alongside all international and national judicial bodies around the world, to seriously follow up the findings of this report, in addition to all previous UN reports documenting the occupation’s crimes and violations, and prosecute the occupation’s leaders as war criminals," it said.

The three-person Independent International Commission of Inquiry was established by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in May 2021 to investigate alleged international law violations in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Israel's mission in Geneva said it “categorically rejects the unfounded allegations”. It accused the commission of advancing a “predetermined and biased political agenda … in a shameless attempt to incriminate the Israel Defence Forces”.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the UNHRC as an "anti-Israel circus" after the publication of the report. "Instead of focusing on the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Hamas terrorist organisation in the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the UN is once again choosing to attack the state of Israel with false accusations, including unfounded accusations of sexual violence," he said. "This is not the Human Rights Council – this is the 'Blood Rights Council'."

Benny Gantz, a leading Israeli opposition politician and former army chief, wrote on X that the report was "not only deceitfully false but a disgraceful new low in the moral depravity of the UN".

Nitrogen tanks, used for storing embryos, lie in the rubble at Al Basma IVF Centre in Gaza city. Reuters

The UN Population Fund estimates at least 50,000 pregnant women were caught up in the Gaza conflict, cut off from maternity care and delivery services. In September, it reported that more than 17,000 pregnant women were on the brink of famine, with nearly 11,000 experiencing severe food shortages.

In February, doctors told the fund's representative Nestor Owomuhangi of the harrowing details of women facing miscarriages as a result of the long and arduous journeys on foot, travelling on broken roads in the wind and rain. About 500,000 returned to Gaza's north after a ceasefire deal took effect in January, many to homes that had been destroyed.