A UN Commission of Inquiry has found evidence of increasing sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Israel targeting Palestinian women and girls
The UN reports documented the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab together with six members of her family in Gaza by the Israeli occupation forces in January 2024
A report by a UN Commission of Inquiry has revealed a sharp increase in sexual and gender-based violence, including rape, against Palestinians by both Israeli security forces and settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Foremost among the findings of the 47-page report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem, is that sexual and gender-based violence by Israel against the Palestinians has taken different forms “in order to dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part.”
The commission found that gender-based violence is part of broader patterns of discriminatory crimes perpetrated within a system of oppression and domination imposed by Israel as the occupying power.
While the Israeli narrative on the events of the 7 October 2023 cross-border attack has repeatedly amplified allegations of rape and sexual violence by the Palestinians, it has yet to present the evidence to substantiate these charges. Requests for information by the commission were rejected by the Israeli authorities.
“The Israeli government refused to cooperate with the commission or respond to requests for information access. The commission has also not received from Israel any further information on violations and abuses committed by the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups on 7 October 2023,” it said.
The commission was set up in 2021 before the 7 October attacks.
The UN Commission of Inquiry report highlights findings on Israel’s increasing gender-based violence, including against pregnant women in Gaza which “amounts to genocide,” according to Omar Shakir, international NGO Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) Israel and Palestine director.
Both HRW and rights group Amnesty International have previously issued similar reports, affirming a growing consensus in the human rights movement, Shakir said.
According to the UN report, some 24,000 out of the 40,717 Palestinians killed by Israel during the war on Gaza that have been identified are women, children, and older persons. Some 33 per cent of all persons killed in Gaza since October 2023 were female, according to the report.
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) intentional heavy air bombardments of residential and private buildings in Gaza rendered women particularly vulnerable.
Entire families have been killed in their homes in unprecedented numbers. Experts have found that during the first month of the war more than nine out of ten women and children killed were in residential buildings, and 95 per cent of women were killed together with at least one child.
The “Israeli targeting of women and girls” section of the report lists a selection of verified accounts of deliberate targeting and killing of civilian women and girls by members of the IOF in Gaza who posed no threat to Israel.
On 16 December 2023, a mother and her adult daughter sheltering in the Catholic Church of the Holy Family Parish in Gaza were killed when an Israeli sniper shot them as they left the building to go to the bathroom in the same compound.
In the absence of evidence indicating the presence of Palestinian fighters or cross-fighting in the area, the report concluded that the Israeli sniper, who would have been able to identify the two persons as women, had deliberately killed them.
The commission documented a case of a pregnant woman killed by an IOF sniper outside the Al-Awda Hospital during the siege in December 2023. Witnesses said that she was shot while walking towards the hospital. According to a witness, no one could reach her due to the presence of the IOF and she died due to her injuries. Her body was left to decompose.
The commission investigated the killing of a woman and four girls in the Tel Al-Hawa neighbourhood of Gaza City on 29 January 2024. The parents were killed while driving a car with four girls and one boy inside it, including their daughter 15-year-old Layan Hamada and her five and a half-year-old cousin Hind Rajab.
“The cases are illustrative examples of women and girls being targeted and victimised” following the IOF expansion of its targeting criteria and in the absence of discernible attempts by Israel to distinguish between combatants and civilians, the report said.
In a previous report to the UN Human Rights Council, the commission reported several statements, including by Israeli officials and members of the Knesset, calling for the “annihilation” of Gaza and calling on Israeli forces not to distinguish between militants and civilians.
Palestinian women have been a specific target of such incitement. Former head of the Israeli National Security Council Major General Giora Eiland made media statements on the need to treat Palestinians in Gaza collectively. “After all, who are Gaza’s elderly women – the same mothers and grandmothers of Hamas fighters who committed the horrific crimes on 7 October,” he said.
The report cites examples of widespread public incitement on Israeli TV, where commentators advocate targeting Palestinian women. “The woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy, and the pregnant woman is an enemy,” said Eliyahu Yosian, a commentator from the Misgav Institute for National Security on Israel’s Channel 14.
Direct attacks on healthcare facilities offering sexual and reproductive healthcare services have impacted about 540,000 women and girls of reproductive age in Gaza. Facilities specifically designated to provide sexual and reproductive healthcare were directly targeted or forced to cease operations, and several maternity wards in other hospitals were forced to close.
An obstetrician in Gaza told the commission that “giving birth in Gaza is like giving birth in the Middle Ages. There is no access to neonatal, prenatal, or post-partum care. Basic equipment for childbirth, such as forceps, is not available, nor are crucial drugs... As a result, maternal morbidity, stillbirths, and miscarriages have increased.”
The lack of pain relief medication has particularly impacted women who have undergone Cesarean sections. One woman told the Commission of her experience at the Emirati Maternity Hospital in Rafah, where she had to share the same bed with another woman because the hospital was overcrowded. Most pregnant women are forced to give birth in shelters such as tents.
In the absence of post-natal care, at least 60,000 maternity patients have been impacted. A midwife said that women have to walk for hours to reach healthcare facilities where the dressing of their Caesarean section wound could be changed, and that they lacked pads to manage the bleeding after childbirth.
Israel’s extended use of starvation as a method of warfare since 2023 by blocking goods from entering Gaza, briefly lifted in January, was reinforced on 2 March. It severely impacts pregnant and lactating women and compounds the experience of displacement.
The commission received information of scores of sexual assaults, public strip searches, and rape threats against Palestinian women and girls by Israeli soldiers. It documented cases of sexual and gender-based violence against male and female detainees in more than 10 Israeli military and other prisons for both male and female detainees.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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