The commission also cited significant evidence of desecration of corpses, including sexual desecration, beheading, tearing, burning and cutting of body parts.
But the committee said Israel had also committed war crimes during its months-long campaign to oust Hamas from Gaza, such as using starvation as a weapon of war through a sweeping siege of Gaza.
The statement stated that Israel’s use of heavy weapons in densely populated areas constituted a direct attack on civilians and contained the basic elements of crimes against humanity. It ignored the need to distinguish between combatants and civilians and caused a large number of civilian casualties, especially among women and children.
The conflict has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Palestinian children, the committee said, with the scale and rate of casualties “unparalleled in conflicts in recent decades”.
Other crimes against humanity committed by Israel in Gaza include “extermination, murder, gender persecution, forced population transfers, torture and inhuman and cruel treatment against Palestinian men and boys,” the committee said.
The panel said the Israeli military used sexual and gender-based violence, including forced nudity and sexual humiliation, as an “operating procedure” against Palestinians during forced evacuations and detentions. “Both male and female victims suffered from this type of sexual violence, but men and boys were targeted in specific ways,” the report said.
“The treatment of men and boys was deliberately sexualized as an act of revenge for the attacks,” it added, referring to October 7.
