A report issued on Thursday by the “U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel” is the world body’s latest assault on the Jewish state. And boy is it ever a brutal one.
No surprise there, given that the chairwoman of the pro-Hamas farce is former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. The 83-year-old South African—who hails from Durban, home of two antisemitic “world conferences on racism”—was appointed to her current post nearly four years ago. That was when the commission was established by the U.N. Human Rights Council for the purpose of concocting a report to demonize Israel.
This aim, though transparent, wasn’t spelled out in Resolution S-30/1, adopted at the UNHRC “emergency special session” on May 27, 2021. But the gist was obvious.
The U.N.’s excuse at the time was “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” Israel’s 11-day campaign that month to defend its citizens and cities against the thousands of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets launched from Gaza. Experts at distorting reality, Pillay and her team came up with the usual lies about Israeli “violations” of international law and “inherently discriminatory features that made the pursuit of justice for Palestinian victims extremely difficult.”
In sum, the Pillay dossier noted the “strength of prima facie credible evidence available that convincingly indicates that Israel has no intention of ending the occupation, has clear policies for ensuring complete control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and is acting to alter the demography through the maintenance of a repressive environment for Palestinians and a favorable environment for Israeli settlers.”
There’s a mendacious mouthful for you. On the other hand, it’s an honest rendition of what the commission has been about since its inception: siding with those whose raison d’être is killing Jews and annihilating the only democracy in the Middle East—one that constantly seeks peace with its Arab neighbors.
It doesn’t take a jihadist rocket scientist to realize this. After all, Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—with thousands of terrorists and Gazan “civilians” committing the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust—didn’t put a dent in U.N. hostility to the Jewish state.
On the contrary, the mass rape, murder and abduction perpetrated by Islamist barbarians on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah served only to enhance the antisemitism of people like Pillay. The neat trick she came up with to invert reality was to charge Israeli security forces with committing widespread sexual crimes against Palestinians throughout the ongoing war.
According to the commission’s Orwellian inversion, “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities.”
The report further “documents a broad range of violations perpetrated against Palestinian women, men, girls and boys across the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023 that constitutes a major element in the ill-treatment of Palestinians and are part of the unlawful occupation and persecution of Palestinians as a group.”
Pillay’s “inescapable conclusion” from the “evidence collected by the commission” is that “Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorize them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination.”
The commission asserts that all of the above is a “strategy of war for Israel to dominate and destroy the Palestinian people.”
Pillay goes into greater fictitious detail.
“The targeting of reproductive healthcare facilities, including through direct attacks on maternity wards and Gaza’s main in-vitro fertility clinic, combined with the use of starvation as a method of war, has impacted all aspects of reproduction,” she is quoted as saying in the press release on the report. “These violations have not only caused severe immediate physical and mental harm and suffering to women and girls, but irreversible long-term effects on the mental health and reproductive and fertility prospects of Palestinians as a group.”
Then there are the men, whom the commission claims have been sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers and police while in detention. The alleged abuse includes “the use of an electrical probe to cause burns to the anus, and the insertion of objects, such as fingers, sticks, broomsticks and vegetables, into the anus and rectum.”
One case cited is that of a Hamas detainee who supposedly suffered severe degradation at the hands of reservists in Unit 100, during a search at the Sde Teiman prison. The incident is described as follows: “The [soldiers], including the commander of the team, kicked the victim and hit him with a baton and tasered him in the head. … The victim was also stabbed in the rectum with a sharp object. The victim’s rectum was raptured due to the assault, and he required surgery to the rectum. … A video filming the assailants were taken by a soldier.”
The commission has Israeli Channel 12 to thank for this utter fabrication. In August, the left-wing network broadcast CCTV footage from Sde Teiman, to show that the 10 IDF reservists who were arrested in a raid on the base in July by masked police officers were not only guilty of “sodomizing” a Nukhba terrorist, but caught on camera doing so.
Never mind that medical exams performed on the “victim” by the head of surgery at Hadassah Medical Center proved the allegations against the reservists to be false. Forget that even if they had been true, Channel 12 had no business “leaking” them to the public prior to a thorough investigation by the proper authorities.
Far more egregious a misstep on the part of the country’s most-viewed television station was that the video in question—which the narrator stated “shows documentation of the offense attributed to the reservists”—was spliced from two different days and locations, then doctored to make it appear valid.
Once it was out there, however, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. The clip went viral, causing Israel’s detractors everywhere to add to their false narrative that IDF soldiers rape Palestinians, female and male, as a matter of course.
Channel 12 has yet to retract or apologize for aiding and abetting the country’s enemies, among them the UNHRC. Oh, and Hamas, of course, whose spokesman, Hazem Qassem, lauded Pillay’s masterpiece.
“The U.N.’s investigation [sic] report on Israel’s genocidal acts against the Palestinian people confirms what has happened on the ground: genocide and violations of all humanitarian and legal standards,” he told Agence France-Presse, which rushed to get a reaction from the group still torturing Israeli hostages in captivity in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his own response, calling the UNHRC an “anti-Israeli circus … exposed as an antisemitic, corrupt, terrorist-supporting and irrelevant body.”
He emphasized that this bias is precisely why Israel withdrew from it last month. Instead of addressing Hamas’s crimes against humanity, he pointed out, the U.N. has “once again [chosen] to attack the State of Israel with false accusations, including baseless charges of sexual violence. The UNHRC “is not the Human Rights Council; it’s the Blood Rights Council.”
Global jihadists wouldn’t have it any other way.