In Gaza, the Gender-Based Violence Against Palestinians ‘Can Only Be Described as Systematic’
UN investigator Chris Sidoti told Jezebel that the targeted attacks are "about humiliation and inflicting pain, denying Palestinians, as a people, all dignity.”
Photo: Getty Images In DepthPolitics
Earlier this month, a 50-page report on “genocidal acts” committed by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians was published by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It’s the fifth report by the Commission since October 2023, and this one specifically focused on gender-based violence against Palestinians, including rape, sexual torture, and targeted attacks on their ability to safely give birth. The Commission ultimately concluded Israel is guilty of “the crime against humanity of extermination.”
“When you look at Israeli soldiers, you wonder how they could be ordinary human beings after this, to come out of a genocidal campaign of this brutality, to their families, kids, communities,” Chris Sidoti, an international human rights lawyer who serves on the Commission and co-wrote the report, told Jezebel.
In addition to extensive testimony from Palestinian victims detailing rape and sexual torture, the report’s findings also accuse Israel of targeted reproductive violence against Palestinians. The Commission determined that Gaza’s 540,000 women and girls of reproductive age have been left without access to sexual and reproductive health care; consequently, rates of deadly infections, miscarriage, and maternal and infant mortality have surged. C-sections in Gaza hospitals are sometimes performed without anesthetic and adequate medical supplies. Describing her struggles with starvation and no access to health care, one new mother who’d given birth told the Commission, “It was a lot for me, it was a lot for women. It’s more than a human can bear.” Some of the strongest evidence of Israel’s deliberate war on Palestinians’ reproduction, Sidoti said, is Israel’s destruction of a fertility clinic in Gaza, which destroyed at least 4,000 embryos.
“The legal definition of genocide is very technical and not always the same as popular understanding,” Sidoti, who’s worked in international human rights law for over four decades, told Jezebel. But he maintains that Israel has “created conditions that make continuing life impossible, impaired birth, and impaired the reproductive capacity of women, also men, through deliberate injuries to their genitals,” all of which entail “genocidal acts.”
Perhaps the most devastating part of this harrowing UN report is the attack on Gaza’s maternity, fertility and reproductive health clinics, attacks which the commission describes as genocidal acts.
The IDF bombing of the Basma IVF Centre killed 4,000 embryos.
www.ohchr.org/sites/defaul…