The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is under fire from Israel for its recently published report alleging Israel’s use of sexual violence against Palestinians since October 2023. The report, titled “’More than a human can bear’: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023,” makes grave accusations against Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the report by denouncing the UNHRC as “an antisemitic, corrupt, terrorist-supporting and irrelevant body.”
“Rather than addressing the crimes against humanity and the war crimes committed by the Hamas terrorist group during a significant attack on the Jewish community, the UN has once again opted to criticize Israel with unfounded claims, including extreme and unfounded accusations of sexual violence. This council is not about human rights – it is about biased rights,” Prime Minister Netanyahu remarked.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference in Jerusalem on December 9, 2024. (MAYA ALLERUZZO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
UNWatch Executive Director Hillel Neuer told Fox News Digital, “the U.N. inquiry is as objective as a Stalinist show trial, and that’s why they completely twisted the facts to falsely accuse Israel of the crimes that Hamas actually committed.”
The report documents a wide range of alleged abuses by Israeli troops, which it calls the Israel Security Forces (ISF), rather than the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the military’s actual name in both Hebrew and English. The report also condemned how Israel was carrying out the war, saying that the destruction led to “disproportionate violence against women and children.”
Additionally, there are complaints in the report of forced public stripping. However, Israel has said that this is necessary to ensure detainees are not hiding explosives. Former IDF Spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus was quoted in the report as saying this in a 2023 CNN interview. Even the report acknowledges that “strip-searches for security justifications are not unlawful,” but claims that Israel’s process was not up to international standards.
A view of the United Nations Headquarters building in New York City, United States on July 16, 2024. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Chair of the Commission Navi Pillay condemned the “deplorable increase in sexual and gender-based violence.” She also says that Israel uses sexual violence to “terrorize” Palestinians and to create “a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination.”
“For decades, the head of the Inquiry, Navi Pillay, has been the world’s leading champion of the 2001 UN ‘Durban Declaration’ slander that a Jewish state is a racist state. Inquiry members have referred to the ‘Jewish lobby’ controlling social media and then complained that antisemitism is ‘always raised as a diversion,’” Anne Bayefsky, Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and President of Human Rights Voices told Fox News Digital.
The commission claims that sexual violence, including rape, is part of the IDF’s “standard operating procedures towards Palestinians.”
Bayefsky alleges the commission “ignored hundreds of thousands of submissions which challenged their conclusions… They have also refused to hear testimony from NGOs that would have contradicted the veracity of their pre-determined end product.”
