Israel’s attacks on reproductive healthcare in Gaza ‘genocidal’: UN probe
A Palestinian woman bids her grandson Tamer farewell in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, after he and his mother were killed in an Israeli strike
Al Jazeera reports on 13 March 2025:
Israel has carried out “genocidal acts” against Palestinians by systematically destroying women’s healthcare facilities during its war on Gaza and using sexual violence as a war strategy, United Nations experts have said.
On Thursday, the Geneva-based Independent International Commission of Inquiry said in a new report that Israel “intentionally attacked and destroyed” Gaza’s main fertility centre while simultaneously blocking medicine for pregnancies, deliveries and neonatal care from entering the enclave.
In its report, the commission found that Israeli authorities “have destroyed … the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare”, it said in a statement.
It added that this amounted to “two categories of genocidal acts” during Israel’s offensive in Gaza, launched after the attacks by Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023.
For its part, “Israel categorically rejects the unfounded allegations”, its mission in Geneva said in a statement. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the UN investigation for “false accusations, including absurd claims”. “The anti-Israeli circus known as the UN Human Rights Council has long been exposed as an anti-Semitic, corrupt, terror-supporting, and irrelevant body,” Netanyahu said in a statement issued by his office on Thursday.
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‘War crime of wilful killing’
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.