UN expert denounces genocidal violence against women and girls
A Palestinian woman and children sit amid the rubble of destroyed buildings in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on 5 February 2025
The UN Human Rights office issues a press release on 17 July 2025:
The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, Reem Alsalem, today called for immediate global action to halt what she described as an unfolding “femi-genocide” in Gaza, saying the scale and nature of the crimes inflicted on Palestinian women and girls by Israeli forces are so extreme that existing concepts in legal and criminal frameworks can no longer adequately describe or capture them.
“What is happening to Palestinian women and girls is not collateral damage of war,” Alsalem said. “It is the intentional destruction of their lives and bodies, for being Palestinian and for being women.”
The Special Rapporteur reiterated findings from her recent report to the Human Rights Council stating that Israel is deliberately killing Palestinian women and girls with the intent to destroy them and the continuity of the Palestinian people. She called this a “femi-genocide”. According to estimates, women and girls account for 67 percent of the 57,680 Palestinians killed by 9 July 2025.
“There is more than one way to subject a people to genocide. Destroying them in whole or in part psychologically is one of them,” the expert said. “The horrors that Palestinian mothers, in particular, continue to endure — watching their children slowly starve, killed, maimed, and buried alive — is killing them repeatedly in a single day. The psychological trauma they, and all Palestinians in Gaza, are suffering knows no boundaries.” Many women, including mothers, have also been killed while seeking food and water for their families.