March 13, 2025 (EIRNS)—Israel carried out “genocidal” acts in Gaza, according to a report by a United Nations Commission of Inquiry released on March 13. The report states that Israel had “intentionally attacked and destroyed” the Palestinian territory’s main fertility center, while imposing a siege and blocked aid, including medication for ensuring safe pregnancies, deliveries, and neonatal care.
According to the United Nations’ genocide convention, crimes committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group constitute genocide.
It was found that Israel was “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 three-person Independent International Commission of Inquiry was established by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 to investigate alleged international law violations in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Pillay, a former UN human rights chief, served as a judge on the International Criminal Court and presided over the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Israel systematically destroyed maternity hospitals and wards, and in December 2023 attacked the Al-Basma IVF Center, destroying around 4,000 embryos at a clinic that served 2,000 to 3,000 patients a month. They intentionally attacked and destroyed the clinic, including all the reproductive material stored for the future conception of Palestinians, according to the report. Since there was no evidence of military activity at the hospital, the commission concluded that the destruction “was a measure intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza, which is a genocidal act.” The wider harm to pregnant, lactating, and new mothers represented an “unprecedented scale,” with an irreversible impact on the reproductive prospects of Gazans. Such acts “amount to crimes against humanity” and deliberately trying to destroy the Palestinians as a group in “acts that amount to the crime against humanity of extermination,” it added.
The report came after the commission had conducted public hearings in Geneva on March 12-13, hearing from victims and witnesses of sexual violence.
