Hamas executed and mutilated dozens of Palestinians in Gaza, conduct rising to the level of war crimes, according to a United Nations report released on Tuesday.
The report, issued by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, identified 249 cases of “executions and severe physical violence” in 2024-2025, leading to at least 108 deaths and 384 injured. Hamas terrorists were involved in at least 60 of those incidents, “including two public executions of 11 men.”
The cases involved “kneecapping, bone-breaking with metal pipes or cement bricks and beatings and were framed by the perpetrators as punishments for alleged collaboration with Israel, looting humanitarian aid, theft, drug-related offenses or affiliations with internal rivals,” the report said.
The acts amount to “the war crimes of murder and torture,” international human rights abuses and humanitarian law violations, a press release announcing the report stated.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry, responding to the report, posted to X on Wednesday: “Since its inception, Hamas has ruled through terror, operating like a ruthless criminal gang. Its brutality toward Palestinians is not an aberration, it is the foundation of its power. Now even the UN is documenting these crimes.”
Srinivasan Muralidhar, chairman of the commission, said, “The commission is gravely alarmed by the severity and public nature of Hamas’s punitive measures in Gaza, which inflict profound trauma on an already severely traumatized civilian population.”
Holding Hamas responsible for its actions is a departure for the commission, which has focused mainly on condemning the Jewish state and has been forced to defend itself from allegations of bias from both Israel and the United States.
Even as its most recent report criticized Hamas, nine of the press release’s 14-paragraph summarizing the commission’s findings were devoted to “settler violence.”
The commission’s chairman took pains to lay the ultimate blame for Hamas’s violence on Israel.
“Violence by settlers is the direct outcome of Israeli policies that support, enable and protect their actions, whereas Hamas-affiliated forces have exploited the vacuum created by relentless Israeli attacks and widespread destruction of Gaza,” Muralidhar said. “While their origins and motivations differ, both operate within environments engineered by Israel.”
Set up in May 2021 by the U.N. Human Rights Council in the immediate wake of Israel’s “Operation Guardian of the Walls,” the commission has in a previous report accused Israel of committing “genocide,” “imposing starvation,” and “systematic destruction” of healthcare and education in Gaza.
The commission’s report will be presented to the Human Rights Council’s in Geneva on June 15.
