Israeli attacks on cultural and religious sites in occupied Palestinian territory amount to war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination, an independent investigation conducted by a United Nations commission has concluded in a new report.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory including East Jerusalem and Israel investigated reports of attacks on cultural, religious and educational sites in Gaza, and in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a whole, as well as in Israel. The commission concluded that Israel has “obliterated Gaza’s education system and destroyed over half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip,” a statistic which its authors attribute to Israel’s “wider campaign of devastation of civilian targets and infrastructure”.
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The report pays special attention to ten religious and cultural sites in Gaza that constituted “civilian objects” at the time of attack and suffered “devastating destruction” for which investigators could not determine a legitime military need. In some cases, the report added, artifacts were destroyed, removed, or looted.
The list included Gaza’s Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, believed to be the third oldest church in the world and a wartime sanctuary for the local Christian and Muslim communities; the seventh-century Great Omari, destroyed in an airstrike; the seizure, looting, and bulldozing of Al Mat’haf Museum, Gaza’s first archaeological museum, which was home to a private antiquity collection; and the bombardment, looting, and “near-total destruction” of the Pasha Palace Museum, a 13th-century repository of Mamluk-era art tradition. The attacks on each named site took place between October and December 2023.
The commission’s legal analysis concluded that Israeli security forces “should have known the locations and significance of prominent cultural sites in Gaza,” and furthermore found that in most of the cases investigated— “particularly those involving demolitions using explosives and bulldozers” — Israeli military forced committed war crimes. The accused war crimes include “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion and historic monuments”; “intentionally launching attacks knowing they would cause damage to civilian objects which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated”; “extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity”; and “destroying the enemy’s property without justification that necessitates such destruction”.
In the case of the Israeli air strike on the 5th-century St. Porphyrius in October 2023, which killed 19 people, including women and children, the report determined that the site was likely “collateral damage due to a targeting error,” however the incident still constitutes a war crime. The church was struck by an Israeli missile again in August 2024. ARTnews reported at the time that one civilian was seriously injured in the second strike, and two others were injured in minor ways.
The analysis continued that damage to “tangible heritage” has a “cascading effect and deeply affects intangible cultural elements, such as religious and cultural practices, memories and history.” Additionally, the sheer number of attacks—110 sites since 7 October 2023, per UNESCO—indicates a “clear disregard for the Palestinian people’s religious beliefs, culture and heritage and undermines the Palestinian people’s culture and identity.”
Also investigated were Israel’s policies and behaviors in the West Bank, including the establishment of illegal settlements in Palestinian World Heritage sites and legislative attempts to transfer control of Palestinian archaeological and cultural sites to the Israel Antiquities Authority. In 2023, for example, plans for a new settlement in Battir, an ancient irrigation site under UNESCO protection, were met with backlash from the local Palestinian community, who warned that it would imperil water accessibility. The commission concluded that Israel’s development of Palestinian archaeological sites was unlawful.
The report ended with recommendations that the Israeli government, foremost, “immediately end the unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory, cease all new settlement plans and activities, remove all settlers and settlements as rapidly as possible in compliance with the [UN’s] International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion of July 2024 and remove all obstructions to the full exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the court’s ruling in a statement that claimed “the legality” of Israeli settlements in the West Bank “cannot be disputed.” The report also called on member states to comply with a 2024 ICJ ruling that deemed the Israeli occupation of Palestinian in violation of international law and take “measures to ensure accountability for perpetrators of international crimes, grave human rights violations and abuses in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory”.
Navi Pillay, chair of the commission, said in a statement, “We are seeing more and more indications that Israel is carrying out a concerted campaign to obliterate Palestinian life in Gaza.”
Pillay added: “Israel’s targeting of the educational, cultural and religious life of the Palestinian people will harm the present generations and generations to come, hindering their right to self-determination.”
Article 7(1)(b) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which establishes the ICC’s jurisdiction over grave violations of international law, such as genocide, defines extermination as “a crime against humanity when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.” Verbatim, the criteria includes the intentional infliction of conditions of life — such as the deprivation of access to food and medicine — calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population. The commission found that attacks on religious sites and school where civilians were sheltering constituted acts that met these criteria.
In a statement quoted by Reuters, representatives of the Israeli government described the report as “an attempt to promote its fictitious narrative of the Gaza war” and proof that its members “care more about bashing Israel than protecting the people of Gaza.” Israel disengaged from the United Nations Human Rights Council, alleging bias, in February.