A United Nations investigation has concluded that Israel carried out "genocidal" acts in Gaza through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities.
The UN Commission of Inquiry said Israel had "intentionally attacked and destroyed" the Palestinian territory's main fertility centre, and had simultaneously imposed a siege and blocked aid including medication for ensuring safe pregnancies, deliveries and neonatal care.
Israel's mission in Geneva said Israel "categorically rejects the unfounded allegations".
The commission found that Israeli authorities "have destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare", it said in a statement.
It said this amounted to "two categories of genocidal acts" during Israel's offensive in Gaza, launched after the attacks by Hamas militants on Israel on 7 October, 2023.
The United Nations' genocide convention defines that crime as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
Of its five categories, the inquiry said the two implicating Israel were "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction" and "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group".
"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," the commission's chair Navi Pillay said in a statement.
The three-person Independent International Commission of Inquiry was established by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 to investigate alleged international law violations in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Ms Pillay, a former UN rights chief, served as a judge on the International Criminal Court and presided over the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Israel accused the commission of advancing a "predetermined and biased political agenda... in a shameless attempt to incriminate the Israel Defence Forces".
Destruction of IVF clinic
The report said maternity hospitals and wards had been systematically destroyed in Gaza, along with the Al-Basma IVF Centre, the territory's main in-vitro fertility clinic.
It said Al-Basma was shelled in December 2023, reportedly destroying around 4,000 embryos at a clinic that served 2,000 to 3,000 patients a month.
The commission found that the Israeli Security Forces intentionally attacked and destroyed the clinic, including all the reproductive material stored for the future conception of Palestinians.
The commission found no credible evidence that the building was used for military purposes.
It concluded that the destruction "was a measure intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza, which is a genocidal act".
Furthermore, the report said the wider harm to pregnant, lactating and new mothers in Gaza was on an "unprecedented scale", with an irreversible impact on the reproductive prospects of Gazans.
Such underlying acts "amount to crimes against humanity" and deliberately trying to destroy the Palestinians as a group, the commission concluded.
'Extermination'
The report came after the commission conducted public hearings in Geneva on Tuesday and Wednesday, hearing from victims and witnesses of sexual violence.
It concluded that Israel had targeted civilian women and girls directly, "acts that constitute the crime against humanity of murder and the war crime of wilful killing".
Women and girls have also died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities impacting access to reproductive health care, "acts that amount to the crime against humanity of extermination", it added.
The commission added that forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault, comprise part of the Israeli Security Forces' "standard operating procedures" toward Palestinians.
Read more:
Hamas welcomes apparent US retreat on Gazan expulsions
UN warns aid stocks are running out in Gaza
Latest Middle East stories
Genocide in international law
The "genocidal acts" that the UN said Israel had carried out are the most serious crimes recognised by international law, but also the most difficult to prove.
Nuremberg trial
The term genocide - derived from the Greek word "genos", for race or tribe, and "cide" from the Latin for "to kill" - was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. A Polish Jew who had fled to the United States, he used it to describe the crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
It was used for the first time within a legal framework by an international military tribunal at Nuremberg to try Nazi leaders for their crimes in 1945. However, those accused were eventually convicted on charges of crimes against humanity.
Legal definition
Genocide is the gravest crime in international humanitarian law - and also the most difficult to prove.
It has been recognised within international law since 1948, with the advent of the UN Convention.
The Convention defines genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
These five acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) was created in 1992 to try the perpetrators of genocide.
Some genocides recognised by international law
The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 was recognised in 1985 as genocide by the UN, as well as by governments and parliaments in many countries, including the US, France and Germany, but fiercely rejected by Turkey.
The Rwandan genocide, in which the UN said some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in 1994, led to the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania.
The massacre of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica, in July 1995 during the Bosnian war, was recognised as genocide by the UN's highest judicial organ, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2007.
The Balkans war crimes court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, has convicted several accused of genocide.
A UN-backed tribunal found two top leaders of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-79 guilty of genocide in a landmark ruling in 2018.
Former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has been on the ICC's wanted list for genocide and crimes against humanity in the western province of Darfur for more than a decade. Arrested by the Sudanese army in 2019, he has still not been handed over.
