The Israeli military has directly targeted the women and girls of Gaza, committing acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder, and the war crime of wilful killing, a UN human rights report says.

“More than a human can bear: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023,” the report is entitled.

Released on March 13 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory — chaired by South African jurist Navi Pillay — the report also concludes that sexual and reproductive health care facilities in Gaza, including maternity hospitals and wards, have been systematically targeted.

The Pillay Commission’s most graphic conclusion arises from the December 2023 shelling of Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, reportedly destroying around 4,000 embryos, as well as 1,000 sperm samples and unfertilized eggs.

Prior to Israel’s assault, the al-Basma in vitro fertilization clinic had been serving thousands of patients, carrying out approximately 70 to 100 IVF procedures a month. Its destruction was intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza, a genocidal act under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Pillay Commission report concludes.

Fifteen months after the clinic’s destruction, Gaza almost entirely in ruins, the death toll considerably higher than the official 50,000 (perhaps three or four times higher), Israel’s war of annihilation may soon resume in full force, with the blessing of the Trump Administration.

Talks aimed at advancing the current ceasefire, that Israel has violated on multiple occasions, drag on.

In early March, countering Donald Trump’s plan to empty the besieged ghetto entirely, and turn it into the Riviera of the Middle East, the Arab League put forward a proposal to reconstruct Gaza, with Gazans in place.

For thoughts on all this, the GPM reached out to Mouin Rabbani.

Rabbani is a researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and contemporary Middle East issues, a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and co-editor of the journal Jadaliyya.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here:

As Israel shreds the laws of war and human rights in Gaza, on the other side of the planet, its conjoined twin is waging war on both domestic human rights, and the UN-based international legal order.

“The new US administration must recommit to human rights at home and abroad,” a large group of human rights experts declared in a report issued on February 27.

Among the Trump Administration acts red-flagged by the experts: its threats to reclaim the Panama Canal, annex Greenland, and “own” Gaza (no mention of its insistence on turning Canada into the 51st state); its “extortionate demands on Ukraine for its critical minerals”; its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, from the UN Human Rights Council and World Health Organization, and its sanctions against the International Criminal Court.

Back in Israel-USA, the report highlights the Trump Administration’s firing of justice officials; its failure to comply with court orders; its elimination of diversity, equity and inclusiveness (DEI) programs; its “demonisation of transgender people,” “persecution and forced deportation of migrants,” “threats to journalists, students and freedom of expression,” and “censoring and removal of public information.”

Scarier still (as if this hasn’t been going on forever), the “corporate capture of the US government.”

The GPM reached out to one of the report’s authors, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to development, Surya Deva, Director of the Centre for Environmental Law at Macquarie University, Australia.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our complete conversation here: