Following is UN Watch’s legal analysis of the March 2025 report of the Pillay Commission of Inquiry titled “More than a human can bear”: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023.
By Dina Rovner, Legal Advisor at UN Watch
As set forth in Resolution S-30/1, the Pillay Commission’s one-sided mandate includes:
- Collecting and preserving evidence “in accordance with international law standards” to “maximize the possibility of its admissibility in legal proceedings.”
- Identify perpetrators with a view to ensuring that they “are held accountable.”
- Recommend “accountability measures” to “end impunity” and “ensure legal accountability,” including through “individual criminal and command responsibility.”
Building upon its previous reports which charge Israel with the worst violations based on a completely one-sided record and in line with the above mandate, this report seeks to further develop the case against Israel for the most serious crimes—war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The report also aims to delegitimize the Israeli justice system as “inherently discriminatory” towards Palestinians for the purpose of dismissing the argument that the principle of complementarity forecloses prosecutions against Israeli officials by the International Criminal Court (Para 161). The Commission specifically states that it has “collected and stored” social media posts from IDF soldiers seemingly with the goal to hold them accountable for their actions in international courts (para 148).
The report asks the Secretary-General to add “Israel in the annexes of the next annual report on conflict related sexual violence” (Para 230). At the same time, it does not cover any violations by the Palestinian Authority or Hamas and has no recommendations for or related to them.
The report suffers from critical deficiencies which render its conclusions unreliable, including the following:
1. Biased, one-sided sources
As the Commission readily admits, it did not receive any information from the Israeli government (Para 4). The factual allegations are based almost exclusively on unnamed witnesses, unidentified Palestinian civil society organizations, and digital evidence such as social media posts, photographs, and videos which are not cited or supplied. Some of these witnesses are unnamed “women human rights defenders” in Gaza (para 110), some of which were previously arrested “under charges of ‘incitement to terrorism’” (para 115). In the absence of information from the IDF regarding its military protocols, security considerations, military justification for certain strikes, and its own investigations into specific incidents, the Commission’s factual presentation is necessarily incomplete, biased, and one-sided. Additionally, the report notes that while the standard of proof usually requires corroboration of “two other independent and reliable sources, verification for sexual violence may rely on a single primary source if deemed credible” (para 6). In other words, the Commission did not require any corroboration to draw a conclusion. In at least one example, the Commission relied on biased UN reports and reports from politicized Palestinian civil society organizations to corroborate information (Para 102). Moreover, at the same time that the Commission relies on biased Palestinian sources, it discounts or ignores accounts from Israeli sources. For example, the Commission determines that videos of captured Hamas fighters confessing to rape during an interrogation are pure “propaganda” (Para 123).
2. Ignores Israeli victims
This report focuses only on Palestinian victims while ignoring the Israeli victims of October 7th and Hamas’s ongoing violations against Israeli hostages still in Gaza. Although the Commission did address some of the Hamas October 7th crimes in its June 2024 report, it ultimately concluded that it was “unable to independently verify” allegations of “rape and gang rape.” The Commission did not sufficiently credit or consider relevant material in the public record, including testimony by Israeli witnesses and survivors or reports by Israeli civil society organizations. Moreover, the Commission ignores the plight of the hostages still in captivity who continue to be subjected to various forms of torture, including sexual violence, as confirmed by hostages released in January and February 2025.
3. Whitewashes Hamas
The Commission whitewashes and legitimizes Hamas by making a false distinction between Hamas and its military wing. According to the report, the October 7th atrocities were perpetrated by “the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups” (Para 4, 78, 220). However, countries like the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada, and the EU have designated the entirety of Hamas as a terrorist organization. This is because they recognize that there is no real distinction between Hamas and its military wing which work together to achieve the Hamas Charter goal of replacing Israel with an Islamic Palestinian state. Nevertheless, the Commission considers Hamas a legitimate entity and not a terrorist organization.
4. Ignores Hamas violations against Palestinians
The report completely ignores Hamas violations inside Gaza against Palestinians, including Hamas’s documented human shield strategy by which it operates from civilian structures, including hospitals and shelters, and its fighters dressing as civilians. This Hamas strategy transforms civilian infrastructure into valid military targets, justifying Israeli strikes against these targets, and contributes to the death of civilians. Instead of holding Hamas accountable, the Commission blames only Israel and gives Hamas a free pass for its violations.
5. Genocide accusation ignores facts, lacks finding of intent
The definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” Thus, the accusation that Israel perpetrated “reproductive violence” through direct attacks on reproductive facilities and blocking access to reproductive health care is presented as “genocidal” (Para 175, 178, 218, 219). In this regard, the Commission ignores countervailing facts indicating that Israel had no intention of blocking access to reproductive care. For example, the report omits mention of the numerous field hospitals and mobile clinics that have been established at different points throughout the war, many of which offer reproductive and maternal health care. Furthermore, a crucial element of the crime of genocide is “intent” to “destroy” the Palestinians as a group “in whole or in part” which is completely missing here. Nevertheless, the Commission’s biased and incomplete factual record led it to reach the unsupported conclusion that certain attacks were carried out with such intent (Para 175-176).
6. Dismisses IDF Investigations
While the IDF has at times published the results of its investigations, it has no obligation to do so or to share that data with the Commission. Nevertheless, at least one of the cases referenced by the Commission has led to an indictment against five IDF reservists. Yet, without any knowledge of the evidence in the hands of Israeli authorities, the Commission completely dismisses this criminal proceeding as inadequate because the indictment did not include a rape charge (Para 155). In another case, the Commission notes that it is “unaware of any report being released as a result of any investigation or of any serious action being taken to hold the perpetrators accountable” (Para 152). However, the fact that the Commission is “unaware” of investigation results does not render investigations inadequate. As of August 2024, the IDF stated that it had launched 74 criminal investigations. This is in addition to hundreds of preliminary investigations for which the IDF had yet to determine whether or not to open a criminal investigation. According to military expert Andrew Fox, “No other peer army…has something similar” to the IDF’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism which “investigates incidents to find out what happened during the conduct of hostilities.” Fox adds that these investigations necessarily take time because of the difficulty in “gathering evidence” from “war zones.”
7. Relies on public statements by Israelis not in a position of authority
In its June 2024 report, the Commission made sweeping accusations against Israel (including claims that Israel called for annihilation of Gaza) based on statements that were misrepresented and taken out of context. Here, the Commission accuses Israel of inciting against Palestinian women, citing only two statements, neither of which are by an Israeli government official. One is by Giora Eiland, former head of the National Security Council until 2006, and another is by Eliyahu Yosian, a commentator for the Misgav Institute for National Security (Para 37-38). Later in the report, the Commission cites to statements by “public media figures that excused or encouraged the use of sexual violence against Palestinians in detention” (Para 159). The report specifically referenced a statement by Israel Hayom journalist Yisrael Schlesinger which it admitted was “later retracted.” Significantly, these individuals are not in the government and have no authority over government or IDF policy.
8. Atrocity Inversion
Not only does the report ignore Israeli victims, but it perversely turns the Israeli victims into the aggressors, using the October 7th sexual crimes as a tool to demonize Israel. For example, the report implies Israel has been exploiting the “sexual violence” committed against it for “political expediency,” thereby “fueling long-standing animosity and dehumanization” of the Palestinians (Para 10). The report also suggests that Israeli attacks on Palestinians reflect “attempts to rebuild Israeli national masculinity through aggression in retaliation” for the October 7th attacks (Para 78) and accuses Israeli soldiers of “intentionally” treating Palestinian men and boys in a “sexualized” manner “as an act of revenge” for October 7th (Para 202).
9. Relies on fake casualty data from the Hamas Health Ministry
Citing directly to the Hamas Health Ministry and other sources that rely on Hamas Health Ministry figures, the report refers to the “extremely high civilian casualty ratio” (Para 21) and falsely asserts that “there is no doubt that civilians comprise the vast majority of the persons killed since the Israeli attacks began” (Para 22). The report ignores analysis by experts which found many problems and inconsistencies with the data, such as failure to distinguish between civilians and combatants, including natural deaths in the casualty count, including deaths from failed-rocket launches and other Hamas-related deaths, and men being recorded as women, among other things. Notably, in May 2024, the UN itself reduced the number of identified women and children deaths by half. In March 2025, the Hamas list dropped 3400 identified deaths, including 1080 children. Therefore, the Hamas numbers are completely unreliable. The Commission also fails to take into account Hamas’s use of child soldiers resulting in some minors under age 18 being legitimately targeted as combatants, or in the possibility that some women could be combatants. Israel maintains that close to half of the deaths are Hamas militants and military experts such as John Spencer have described the civilian to combatant ratio here as “historically low for high intensity urban warfare.”
10. Conclusions not supported
Throughout the report, the Commission makes broad conclusory statements that rest on questionable assumptions and incomplete facts in order to indict Israel while exonerating Hamas. For example, the Commission states that:
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- “The ISF considers all adult male Palestinians in Gaza to be members of armed groups so legitimate targets” (para 22) because the Israeli estimate for number of combatants killed matches the estimated number of adult males killed. This fails to take into account Hamas’s use of child soldiers which means that the number of combatants killed includes both adult males and minors who are combatants or the possibility of some women being combatants. It is also based on the Hamas Health Ministry number of adult males killed which is unreliable due to proven inconsistencies in the data.
- Regarding the case of two women that had been shot in the courtyard of a church in the vicinity of IDF activity, the Commission noted that according to witnesses “Israeli soldiers were deployed in the street behind the church complex and shouted in Arabic that it was forbidden to move outside.” The Commission nonetheless concluded that “the women were shot by an ISF sniper, who must have been able to identify the moving persons as women” (para 31). Given the warnings to the women not to go outside, Hamas’s practice of operating in civilian areas and dressing as civilians, and the Commission’s lack of access to IDF data from the field, the Commission has no basis to conclude whether the shooter “must have been able to identify” the victims as women.
- “Given the increasing numbers of female fatalities in conflicts in Gaza over the past 20 years and the fact that women are more likely to experience conflict as civilians rather than combatants, the ISF could reasonably foresee high numbers of women and girls being killed and injured in its military operations in Gaza since 7 October 2023 yet took no steps to avoid and reduce these casualties.” (Para 165). This conclusion fails to take into consideration both Hamas actions that contribute to deaths of women, such as operating from civilian areas, and Israeli steps to avoid such deaths, such as evacuations.
- “The intentional destruction of reproductive health care, infrastructure and facilities that provide essential services for the population of Gaza to survive and reproduce exhibits the intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part. The Commission concludes that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question.” (Para 176). The Commission completely disregards the fact that Hamas operates from civilian areas, including medical facilities, as well as the fact that Israel facilitated establishment of field hospitals and other temporary clinics to supply reproductive health care services.
- “In the cases documented by the Commission where soldiers ordered Palestinians to strip, the Commission finds that, because of the way this was ordered, the duration and the physical, sexual and verbal abuse that followed, these acts were intended to humiliate and subjugate the victims and were not carried out for security reasons.” (Para 189). The Commission discounts legitimate security concerns that arise in a combat situation involving Hamas terrorists who disguise themselves as civilians and use the civilian population as human shields.
