It doesn’t matter what the UN report on Gaza says. Israel will ignore it anyway

A Palestinian woman carries a baby as families leave the eastern sector of the Gaza Strip on the border with Israel following Israeli airstrikes

Becca Strober writes in Haaretz on 19 March 2025:

Last week, the UN released a report detailing Israel’s use of sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israeli detention centers since October 7. The report states that “Israeli authorities have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group,” categorizing it as one of the genocidal acts under international law. It also concluded that Israel is systematically using sexual violence as a weapon of war against both Palestinian women and men.

As an Israeli educator on the occupation, part of my role is to consider the content in these reports, try to understand its validity, and to incorporate it back into my political education. So I read the report in full. It wasn’t easy, and I had to take breaks. For the most part, the information in the UN report wasn’t new; what struck me was that these abuses were categorically and knowingly ignored for 18 months.

Despite the evidence presented, Israeli officials immediately rejected it, labeling it “antisemitic” and “a blood libel.” Some of this is motivated by Israeli anger at the UN, for allegations acknowledged by the agency itself that nine employees of UNRWA may have participated in the October 7 attacks on Israel. However, by condemning the report outright, the Israeli government frees itself from having to address the concrete, documented evidence of systematic sexual and gender based violence. This is unsurprising. Just last month, Israel withdrew from the Human Rights Council, the very body that released this report.

This response confirms a troubling unwillingness to confront documented human rights concerns visible in plain sight: from Palestinian men stripped down to their underwear during searches to documented sexual violence in detention centers to restricting healthcare for pregnant women.

This denial doesn’t stop at the government; Israeli society too continues to dismiss reports of damning human rights abuses, whether from international, Palestinian, or even Israeli sources. Over the last decade working to educate Israelis about the occupation, I’ve observed a consistent pattern: divorcing our actions from their consequences.

When confronted with uncomfortable realities, we either blame Palestinians for “forcing our response” or deny these realities altogether. This rejection of agency is striking – we claim Hamas forced our hand, yet our government and military actively chose to target civilian infrastructure, restrict humanitarian aid to dire levels, bomb hospitals, and ignore credible reports of sexual violence.

Far from a blood libel, which refers to false accusations of guilt, much of the evidence is sourced and consistent with the information available over the past year and a half. The report relied on and cites a diversity of sources, including testimony from multiple Palestinian civilians and medical professionals working in the Strip, as well as through other means such as satellite imagery. The report also notes that despite formal requests, the Israeli government did not respond or provide information on sexual and gender-based violence, including those committed by Hamas or other Palestinian actors. Surely we cannot point fingers at the UN for one-sidedness, if our side isn’t even responding.

Evidence of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees has been well documented since at least May 2024: five Israeli soldiers were charged with assaulting a Palestinian man in the Sde Teiman detention facility in July 2024. Whistleblowers and witnesses, including both Israeli soldiers and Palestinians detainees, have testified of abuse that reaches far beyond the one incident for which the soldiers are being charged.

The report also describes “reproductive violence” defined as acts which interfere with “reproductive autonomy and rights.” As of October, 42,000 pregnant women in Gaza were at the “crisis level of hunger” and another 3,000 at “catastrophic level” per the report, with another 16,500 in need of treatment for acute malnutrition. 99 percent of lactating mothers reported being unable to produce enough milk, leaving infants to suffer.

After 16 months of bombardment, including attacks on hospitals, blocking aid, and limited access to safe water, women’s health, and prenatal or postnatal care, these statistics are far from surprising. In fact, it’s common sense: here are our actions, and these are the consequences.

Instead of acting to change these practices, the Israeli government is doubling down, and in early March halted aid to the Strip. We cut power sources needed for water filtration, and, as of yesterday, resumed intensive aerial bombings, killing civilians in the hundreds and devastating civilian infrastructure.

In a society where well-sourced human rights reports are systematically labeled as biased or antisemitic, we face a critical accountability gap. Who will ensure that documented violations are addressed? Who demands that these abuses cease?

We Israelis have mastered the art of willful blindness. We have constructed elaborate narratives of victimhood to systematically ignore the mountain of evidence documenting our abuses. Our collective shoulder-shrugging is not confusion; it is complicity. Our public silence is not neutrality; it is endorsement.

The pattern is brutally predictable: atrocities are documented, officials cry “antisemitism,” and the public nods along, relieved of any responsibility to confront ugly truths. This isn’t mere passivity. It’s a sophisticated national exercise in moral evasion.

These human rights violations aren’t tragic accidents or necessary evils but instead deliberate consequences of policies we refuse to challenge. Our government depends on our practiced indifference, our muscle memory to look away when presented with evidence of systematic abuse.

Israelis can continue dismissing UN reports as “blood libel” if it helps us sleep better at night. But this reflexive rejection only confirms the report’s underlying assertion: that we’ve built a system designed to perpetuate these abuses while insulating ourselves from accountability. Every report we dismiss without examination makes us not just bystanders, but architects of continued suffering.

Becca Strober runs the instagram page becca.explains.the.occupation and is a former senior director at the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence and current head of the board at Sadaka-Reut.

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