‘Blood libel’: Israel slams UN report claiming it committed ‘genocidal acts’ in Gaza
Israeli officials, women’s groups accuse UN panel of bias and antisemitism for alleging Israeli forces ‘intentionally destroyed’ fertility center and perpetrated sexual violence
Israel on Thursday denounced as a “blood libel” a new United Nations report that accused the country of perpetrating “genocidal acts” against Palestinians in the war started by the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, and that claimed Israeli forces systematically destroyed women’s healthcare facilities and used sexual violence as a war strategy.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, women’s groups and Israel’s mission to the UN rejected the report as unfounded and antisemitic, saying it attempted to equate Israel’s conduct during the fighting in the Gaza Strip with the horrific acts of sexual violence committed by Palestinian terrorists during the Hamas-led atrocities that sparked the war. The Foreign Ministry called it “one of the worst cases of blood libel the world has ever seen.”
The report was published Thursday by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel. The three-person body was formed in May 2021, following a previous round of conflict in Gaza, to probe alleged human rights violations.
According to the Thursday report, Israel “intentionally attacked and destroyed” Gaza’s main fertility center while imposing a siege on Strip and blocking aid that included medication meant to ensure safe pregnancies, deliveries and neonatal care.
“Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births, one of the categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention,” the report read.
Those purported actions, in addition to what the report said was a surge in maternity deaths due to restricted access to medical supplies, amounted to the crime against humanity of extermination, the commission stated.
The report also alleged Israel’s security forces used forced public stripping and sexual assault as part of their standard operating procedures to punish Palestinians following October 7, 2023, when more than 5,000 Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages. Israeli officials have said that strip-searching suspects is necessary to ensure they are not concealing weapons or explosive belts under their clothes.
Responding to the report, Netanyahu called the UN Human Rights Council “an antisemitic, rotten, terrorist-supporting, and irrelevant body.”
“Instead of focusing on the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Hamas terrorist organization… the United Nations once again chooses to attack the state of Israel with false accusations,” he said in a statement.
The Foreign Ministry said the report was on par with the most damaging antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history.
“It is one of the worst cases of blood libel the world has ever seen (and the world has seen many),” the ministry said on X. “It accuses the victims of the crimes committed against them. Hamas is the organization that has committed horrendous sexual crimes against Israelis. It is indeed a sick document that only an antisemitic organization such as the UN could produce.”
Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Daniel Meron, told The Times of Israel that the UN report “is yet another example of the blood libel that actors within the UN perpetuate against Israel in a futile attempt to accuse it of acts that were never committed, while diverting attention from the war crimes of terrorist organizations and the states that support them.”
He added, “Instead of fabricating accusations, it is time for the UN to explicitly condemn Hamas for its actions and to expose in its discussions the horrific sexual violence committed against Israelis on October 7 and afterward.”
The Permanent Mission of Israel to the UN in Geneva said in a press release that the Commission of Inquiry “deliberately adopts a lower level of corroboration in its report, which allowed it to include information from second-hand single uncorroborated sources. This is inconsistent with established UN verification standards and methodologies.”
It accused the commission of “predetermined and biased political agenda… in a shameless attempt to incriminate the Israel Defense Forces.”
#PressRelease Israel categorically rejects the unfounded allegations made by the Commission of Inquiry pic.twitter.com/R5RvIrEpdU
— Israel in UN/Geneva???????????????? | #BringThemHome (@IsraelinGeneva) March 12, 2025
“The IDF has concrete directives… and policies which unequivocally prohibit such misconduct,” it stressed, adding that its review processes are in line with international standards.
The term “blood libel” refers to historic accusations that Jews in Europe used Christian blood for ritual purposes. The accusations often sparked deadly attacks on Jews. In recent years, Israel and pro-Israel groups have employed the term to criticize harsh allegations against the country.
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid called the UN report “a sick, antisemitic document, disconnected from reality.”
“The UN institutions in Gaza are the terror bases from which Hamas emerged to massacre Israeli civilians in their homes, to rape women, and burn babies alive,” he posted to X.
Lapid called the report “a big white-washing attempt, motivated by hatred of Jews.”
Women’s groups also panned the report.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who heads the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, an independent body that chronicles accounts of sexual violence against victims in Israel during the Hamas attack, said the report follows the pattern of “efforts to create a false comparison between Israel and Hamas, especially in the context of sexual violence.”
“Sadly, this pattern has repeated itself across various UN bodies since October 7th,” she said in a statement. “This moral comparison is painful and wrong because its purpose is to establish false historical narratives and inflicts irreparable harm both on the victims and on justice.”
“We have always believed in international institutions and the human rights system, but such conduct, which seeks to entrench false historical narratives, must end. We owe the truth to the victims,” said Elkayam-Levy.
Hagit Peer, president of Israeli women’s rights group Na’amat, said the “outrageous report attempts to turn the victim into the aggressor” and accused international groups that campaign against sexual violence of ignoring Israeli and Jewish victims.
“This report reeks of blatant antisemitism. There is an effort here to create an alternative and inverted reality regarding the sexual massacre carried out by Hamas against Israeli women and men, while international institutions remain deafeningly silent,” she said.
The UN, and its women’s organization in particular, were heavily criticized by Israel for their slow response to the evidence of Hamas’s sexual violence that emerged after October 7. It took eight weeks for UN Women to denounce the attacks, saying it condemned the atrocities of October 7 and was “alarmed” by the reports of sexual violence.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 48,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the Hamas onslaught.
Israel has said it sought to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
‘Measures intended to prevent births’
The United Nations’ genocide convention defines the crime of genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
Of its five categories, the commission inquiry said the two implicating Israel were “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.”
Navi Pillay, the commission’s chair, said in a statement: “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.”
Pillay, a South African jurist and former UN rights chief, has served as a judge on the International Criminal Court and presided over the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
The report said maternity hospitals and wards had been systematically destroyed in Gaza, along with the Al-Basma IVF Centre, the territory’s main in-vitro fertility clinic.
It said Al-Basma was shelled in December 2023, reportedly destroying around 4,000 embryos at a clinic that served 2,000 to 3,000 patients a month, seeming to cite the director’s claims about the extent of the damage from four months later. In response to those allegations, the IDF reiterated that it “does not deliberately target civilian infrastructure, including IVF clinics.”
The commission said it found that the Israeli security forces intentionally attacked and destroyed the clinic, including all the reproductive material stored for the future conception of Palestinians.
The commission claimed it found no credible evidence that the building was used for military purposes.
It concluded that the destruction “was a measure intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza, which is a genocidal act.”
Furthermore, the report said the wider harm to pregnant, lactating and new mothers in Gaza was on an “unprecedented scale,” with an allegedly irreversible impact on the reproductive prospects of Gazans.
Such underlying acts “amount to crimes against humanity” and deliberately trying to destroy the Palestinians as a group, the commission declared.
‘Extermination’
The report came after the commission conducted public hearings in Geneva on Tuesday and Wednesday, hearing from victims and witnesses of alleged sexual violence.
It claimed that Israel had targeted civilian women and girls directly, “acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder and the war crime of willful killing.”
Women and girls have also died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities impacting access to reproductive health care, “acts that amount to the crime against humanity of extermination,” it added.
The commission further purported that forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault, comprise part of Israeli forces “standard operating procedures” toward Palestinians.
In March 2024, the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict said there were reasonable grounds to conclude that victims in Israel had been raped and subjected to other forms of sexual violence by Palestinians during the October 7 attack. At least one freed hostage has also reported being raped by her captor and others have recounted sexual harassment and assaults in captivity.
Israel is party to the Genocide Convention and was ordered in January 2024 by the International Court of Justice to take action to prevent acts of genocide during the war against Hamas.
However, Israel is not party to the Rome Statute, which gives the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to rule on individual criminal cases involving genocide and crimes against humanity.
South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel’s actions in Gaza at the International Court of Justice. Israel has angrily rejected the charge.
