Israel slammed the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) after it produced a report claiming, falsely, that Israel tried to harm Palestinian fertility during the recent war in Gaza, and used sexual violence against Palestinians.
The report is an inversion of earlier, actual findings, confirmed by the United Nations a year ago, that Palestinian terrorists used sexual violence, including rape, against Israeli women and men on October 7, 2023, and thereafter.
The new report emerges from the HRC, a body that includes many dictatorial governments that have no concern whatsoever for the human rights of their own citizens, and which is obsessively devoted to attacking Israel.
The report says: “Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities.”
Among its claims, the report accuses Israel of deliberately destroying “reproductive healthcare facilities” during the war in Gaza to damage Palestinian fertility, repeating a conspiracy theory that circulated among anti-Israel activists online during the conflict.
Israeli Prime Minister Benamin Netanyahu rejected the report, issuing a statement (translated from Hebrew by the Government Press Office):
The anti-Israel circus known as the UN ‘Human Rights Council’ has long been revealed as an antisemitic, rotten and irrelevant organization that supports terrorism. For good reason Israel decided to quit it approximately one month ago.
Instead of focusing on the crimes against humanity and the war crimes that were perpetrated by the Hamas terrorist organization in the worst massacre carried out against the Jewish People since the Holocaust, the UN has again chosen to attack the State of Israel with false accusations, including baseless accusations of sexual violence.
Israel’s foreign ministry called the report “one of the worst cases of blood libel the world has ever seen”:
In regard to the blood libel published by the ‘Commission of Inquiry’:
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) March 13, 2025
It is one of the worst cases of blood libel the world has ever seen (and the world has seen many). It accuses the victims of the crimes committed against them. Hamas is the organization that has committed… pic.twitter.com/64rb5DTyEN
The term “blood libel” refers to the medieval practice of falsely accusing Jews of murdering Christian children for ritual purposes, a claim that has been imported by, and amplified in, the Muslim world in recent decades.
President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the HRC — both in his first term, and in the first days of his second. President Joe Biden rejoined the HRC, on the argument that American engagement could help reform it.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
