UN-backed human rights experts yesterday said in a report that Palestinian militants and Israeli forces committed war crimes, while Israel was also said to have committed crimes against humanity.
Israel, which has refused to cooperate with the body and accused it of bias, rejected the allegations.
The report by the UN Commission of Inquiry, which covered the time between the rampage on Oct. 7 last year and the end of last year, laid out a wide array of alleged rights violations and crimes by both sides during the conflict.
Photo: AFP
The military wings of Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups had performed deliberate killings and mistreatment of civilians and hostage-takings, it said.
Israeli forces had committed acts including forced starvation, murder or willful killing, collective punishment and intentional attacks on civilians, it said.
The findings come as the conflict entered its ninth month with few signs of letting up.
The experts had documented “cases indicative of sexual violence” by Hamas against women and men near the site of a large music festival, a military outpost and several kibbutzim that the raiders attacked, the report said.
It added that the frequency, prevalence and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes against Palestinians by Israeli security forces during the period late last year amounted to signs that some forms of such violence “are part of ISF [Israel Security Forces] operating procedures.”
Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said that the report “outrageously and repugnantly attempts to draw a false equivalence between IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers and Hamas terrorists with regards to acts of sexual violence.”
Meanwhile, Lebanese militant group Hezbollah fired successive barrages of rockets at Israel.
Hezbollah said it launched “dozens of Katyusha rockets” at three bases and a barracks in northern Israel.
The group said it also struck a “military factory” with missiles “in response to the assassination carried out by the Zionist enemy.”
The Israeli army said more than 150 “projectiles” had been fired from Lebanon in three successive barrages.
The army said that in response it struck a rocket launcher and “four terrorist infrastructure sites ... from which projectiles were fired at northern Israel.”
The latest barrages from Lebanon came after an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday killed Taleb Sami Abdallah, a senior Hezbollah commander.
Additional reporting by AFP
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