A United Nations panel investigating the October 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent conflict in Gaza has accused both Palestinian armed groups and Israel of war crimes, and the panel said Israel’s conduct of the war included crimes against humanity .
In a report released on Wednesday, the three-member panel — led by Navi Pillay, the former UN human rights chief — provided the UN’s most detailed examination of the events on October 7 and beyond. The report itself does not impose sanctions, but presents a legal analysis of actions in the Gaza conflict that are likely to be weighed by the International Court of Justice and other international criminal proceedings. Israel did not cooperate with the investigation and protested the panel’s assessment of its conduct, the panel said.
The report said Hamas’ military wing and six other Palestinian armed groups — aided in some cases by Palestinian civilians — killed and tortured people in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in which more than 800 civilians were among the 1,200 killed. An additional 252 people, including 36 children, were held hostage, the report said.
“Many abductions were carried out with significant physical, mental and sexual violence and humiliating and degrading treatment, including in some cases parading the abductees,” the report said. “Women and women’s bodies were used as trophies of victory by male perpetrators.”
Hamas has rejected all accusations that its forces are involved in sexual violence against Israeli women, the committee noted.
The commission also reported significant evidence of desecration of corpses, including sexual desecration, beheadings, wounds, burns, and cutting off body parts.
But Israel, during its months-long campaign in Gaza to oust Hamas, has also committed war crimes, the panel said, such as using hunger as a weapon of war through a total siege of Gaza.
It said Israel’s use of heavy weapons in populated areas amounted to a direct attack on the civilian population and had the basic elements of a crime against humanity, ignoring the need to distinguish between combatants and civilians and causing a disproportionately large number of civilian casualties. especially among women and children.
The conflict had killed or maimed tens of thousands of Palestinian children, a scale and rate of casualties that was “unparalleled in conflicts in recent decades,” the commission said.
Other crimes against humanity committed by Israel in Gaza, the commission said, include “exterminations, murders, sexual persecution of Palestinian men and boys, forced population transfer, torture and inhuman and cruel treatment.”
The commission said Israeli forces used sexual and gender-based violence, including forced nudity and sexual humiliation, as an “operating procedure” against Palestinians during the forced evictions and detentions. “Both male and female victims suffered such sexual violence,” the report said, “but men and boys were targeted in particular ways.”
“The treatment of men and boys was deliberately sexualized as an act of retaliation for the attack,” it added, referring to October 7.
In a statement responding to the report, Israel’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva denounced what it called “systematic anti-Israel discrimination.” He said the commission ignored Hamas’ use of human shields and tried “outrageously and disgustingly” to create a false equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli military in relation to sexual violence.
The commission — which includes Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights law expert, and Miloon Kothari, an Indian human rights and social policy expert — said Israel refused to cooperate with its investigation and denied the group access. in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Israel also did not respond to six requests for information, the committee said.
The team based its findings on interviews with survivors and witnesses conducted remotely and in person on visits to Turkey and Egypt. It also drew on satellite imagery, forensic records and open-source data, including photos and videos taken by Israeli troops and shared on social media.
The panel said it identified the people most responsible for war crimes or crimes against humanity, including senior members of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups and senior members of Israel’s political and military leadership, including members of its war cabinet. The committee said it would continue its investigations focusing on individuals with individual criminal responsibility and management or senior responsibility.
