The commission also cited significant evidence of the desecration of corpses, including sexualized desecration, decapitations, lacerations, burning and the severing of body parts.
But Israel, during its monthslong campaign in Gaza to oust Hamas, has also committed war crimes, the commission said, like the use of starvation as a weapon of war through a total siege of Gaza.
It said Israel’s use of heavy weapons in densely populated areas amounted to a direct attack on the civilian population and had the essential elements of a crime against humanity, disregarding the necessity of distinguishing between combatants and civilians and causing a disproportionately high number of civilian casualties, particularly among women and children.
The conflict had killed or maimed tens of thousands of Palestinian children, a scale and a rate of casualties that were “unparalleled across conflicts in recent decades,” the commission said.
Other crimes against humanity committed by Israel in Gaza, the commission said, included “extermination, murder, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, forcible transfer of the population, torture, and inhuman and cruel treatment.”
The panel said Israeli forces used sexual and gender-based violence, including forced nudity and sexual humiliation, as “an operating procedure” against Palestinians in the course of forced evacuations and detentions. “Both male and female victims were subjected to such sexual violence,” the report said, “but men and boys were targeted in particular ways.”
“The treatment of men and boys was intentionally sexualized as an act of retaliation for the attack,” it added, referring to Oct. 7.