Israel on the UN Blacklist for Sexual Crimes in War: the State That Blocked Its Own Investigation to Avoid Being Investigated

On 29 May 2026, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres published the annual report on sexual violence in armed conflicts. For the first time in the fifteen years since the mechanism was established, the name of Israel appears in the annex listing actors considered credible suspects of committing, or being responsible for, systematic patterns of rape and other forms of sexual violence in war zones. The documentation that led to this listing is not recent; it has existed, in the form of verified testimonies, leaked videos, expert reports and independent body resolutions, since mid-2024. What took eighteen months was not knowledge of the facts. It was the political decision to convert that knowledge into an administrative act.

The Mechanism and What It Does Not Do

Before entering into the facts, it is worth clarifying what this document is and, above all, what it is not. The annual report on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence (CRSV) is a report that the Office of the UN Secretary-General presents each year to the Security Council. Its most sensitive component is the annex, a list of actors, states and armed groups, that the UN considers “credible suspects” of having committed or encouraged patterns of rape and other forms of sexual violence in active conflicts. Inclusion on that list does not trigger automatic sanctions, does not activate any mechanism of the International Criminal Court, and produces no direct legal consequences. It is, in the technical language of international law, a naming-and-shaming instrument, a pressure mechanism that functions through the public exposure of actors responsible for documented crimes. Its sole immediate effect is political and diplomatic. The list has existed since 2010. In fifteen years, it had never contained the name of Israel.

And yet Tel Aviv treated it as a death sentence. Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon reacted on Thursday evening with a video statement that immediately circulated on social media. “We are done with this secretary-general,” he declared. Israel froze its relations with Guterres’s office. The Foreign Ministry characterised the decision as “a blood libel”, a deliberate reference to historical antisemitism whose function is to foreclose any rational debate about the document’s content. Its spokesman described it as “a moral disgrace”. The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) responded by reaffirming that torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence, against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons were “systematically documented”. This was the institutional acknowledgement that the evidence had not changed. What had changed was the political cost of continuing to ignore it.

What Happened at Sde Teiman and What Did Not Happen Afterwards

The case that precipitated the public crisis has a precise date. On 5 July 2024, a Palestinian detainee was transferred to hospital from the Sde Teiman detention facility, located in the Negev desert in southern Israel, with several broken ribs, a perforated lung, and serious rectal injuries. The facility had been created after the 7 October 2023 attack to hold prisoners captured in Gaza, and had already accumulated dozens of prior complaints of torture and ill-treatment. But this case was different. There was a video.

The Israeli army initially detained nine soldiers for interrogation. A subsequent investigation by the Military Police identified five reservists as responsible for beating, torturing, and gang-raping the detainee. The surveillance footage showed the soldiers, faces covered, dragging the man towards a cordoned-off area within the compound. The video was leaked to the media. The Israeli Defence Forces’ chief legal adviser was arrested months later for her alleged role in the leak, and ultimately acknowledged in her resignation letter that her office had distributed the footage. In February 2025, military prosecutors filed formal charges against the five reservists. Up to that point, the Israeli judicial system appeared, at least formally, to be functioning.

It did not function. On 13 March 2026, the Israeli army dropped all charges against the five soldiers. The official justification was “procedural difficulties related to the transfer of information by the Israeli police”. The detainee had already been returned to Gaza. There was no victim available on Israeli soil. No conviction was possible. The chronology deserves to be read carefully. Charges were dropped on 13 March 2026. Two and a half months later, on 29 May 2026, Israel appears on the UN blacklist. Internal impunity and international pressure operate in exactly opposite directions, in real time, with neither institution appearing to register the existence of the other.

The political reaction inside Israel said more than the judicial decision itself. When the soldiers were placed in custody for interrogation in July 2024, hundreds of far-right activists stormed Sde Teiman’s facilities to demand their immediate release. Among those who publicly backed the accused were Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, the same official who held political responsibility for the Israeli prison system. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, in a report titled with precision “Welcome to Hell”, catalogued the Israeli detention system as a network of torture camps, drawing on hundreds of testimonies documented across multiple facilities. It was not political hyperbole. It was an operational description. The scandal was not the abuse. The scandal was the arrest of the soldiers.

The Pramila Patten Paradox

In January 2025, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed an episode that merits close attention for its internal logic. Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, had requested authorisation from Israel to investigate the sexual crimes committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. It was a request that the Israeli government itself, under pressure from victims’ families and civil organisations, had been demanding for months. There appeared, on the surface, to be every political incentive for the UN to formally document and condemn what Hamas had done.

But Patten set a condition. To investigate the crimes of 7 October, her team also needed access to Israeli detention centres holding Palestinian prisoners, in order to document the allegations against Israeli soldiers as well. It was a methodological requirement consistent with the special representative’s bilateral mandate. Israel refused the request. The result was paradoxical in its mechanics; by blocking the investigation into its own crimes, Israel simultaneously prevented the UN from formally documenting Hamas’s crimes. The logic was comprehensible. What would have been found in Israeli prisons was serious enough to justify that political cost. The refusal, as reported by Haaretz, was the implicit confession of a state that preferred to sacrifice documentation of its enemy’s crimes rather than allow anyone inside its own facilities.

In January 2025, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, requested access to Israeli detention centres as a precondition for investigating Hamas’s sexual crimes of 7 October 2023. Israel refused the request. Patten’s office formally warned the Israeli government that this refusal could lead to Israel’s inclusion on the blacklist of actors responsible for sexual violence in conflicts. The Israeli government, informed of the risk, chose not to act.

July 2025, the Report That Absolved One Party and the Internal Fracture at the UN

In July 2025, Guterres published his annual CRSV report. The document described, in the section devoted to “Israel and the State of Palestine”, the accumulated evidence of sexual violence committed by Hamas on 7 October and the accumulated evidence against Israeli forces for their treatment of Palestinian detainees in their own facilities. The description presented an almost perfect symmetry in evidentiary terms. But the annex, the list, told a different story. Hamas appeared among the suspect actors. Israel did not. The asymmetry did not go unnoticed. Analyst Norman Finkelstein published an extensive analysis asking whether Guterres had “betrayed Gaza and the UN to appease Israel”, precisely documenting the gap between what the body of the report described and what the annex recorded.

But the internal story is more complex than a simple capitulation by Guterres to Israeli pressure. Diplomatic sources cited by the Times of Israel in late May 2026 indicated that, for the 2026 report, it was Guterres himself who pushed for Israel’s inclusion on the list, and that he did so over the objections of Pramila Patten herself. The special representative, author of the March 2024 report that found “clear and convincing” evidence of Hamas sexual violence during 7 October, is said to have resisted Israel’s inclusion during the previous cycle. What this reveals is not a coherent system but a fractured one. The secretary-general and his own special representative were operating according to different criteria when faced with the same body of evidence. The resistance was not coming only from Tel Aviv. It was also coming from inside the UN building.

The factor that appears to have definitively tipped the balance was the publication, in May 2026, of a column by journalist Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, which documented in detail the systematic sexual violence by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians. Israel characterised the article as “blood libel”, threatened to sue the newspaper, and demanded the text be withdrawn. The OHCHR responded with a public statement reaffirming that the abuses were “systematically documented”. This was the institutional acknowledgement that the evidence had not changed. What had changed was the political temperature and the accumulated pressure on those who continued to choose inaction.

What the Commission of Inquiry Found in 2025

Two months after Israel’s blockage of Patten’s investigation, on 13 March 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory submitted a 49-page report to the UN Human Rights Council. Its title was “More Than a Human Can Bear”. The Commission, chaired by former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, found that Israel was employing sexual and gender-based violence “as part of a broader effort to undermine the Palestinians’ right to self-determination”. The report concluded that the escalation of abuses had directly followed the orders and instructions of Minister Ben Gvir in his capacity as the political head of the prison system. The frequency, prevalence and severity of the crimes led the Commission to conclude that sexual violence was being used as a method of warfare to destabilise, dominate and destroy the Palestinian population.

The UN Commission of Inquiry’s report A/HRC/58/CRP.6, dated 13 March 2025, concluded that “the mistreatment of Palestinian detainees by Israeli authorities is the result of an intentional policy that utilises sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence to humiliate and degrade Palestinians in detention”. The report documented these practices across multiple facilities, during interrogations, transfers and periods of detention, and noted that they had “increased significantly in severity and frequency since 7 October 2023, following orders and statements of the Minister of National Security Ben Gvir”. The document described direct genital violence, electrocution, prolonged forced nudity as a method of humiliation and coerced confession, and the use of trained dogs against detainees.

The UN was not alone in this documentation. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem itself had all published comparable testimonies. In November 2024, Al-Araby TV correspondent Mohammed Arab, detained at Ofer Prison after being transferred from Sde Teiman, described in detail acts of sexual torture committed by Israeli guards, including the use of electric batons on detainees’ genitals. None of these publications generated an institutional response commensurate with their evidentiary weight. The system of impunity does not function by denying facts. It functions by ensuring that their official recognition always arrives too late to produce consequences.

The Flotilla and the Threshold That Was Crossed

On 20 May 2026, nine days before the CRSV report was published, Israeli forces intercepted in international waters the Global Sumud humanitarian flotilla, comprising around 428 activists aboard 50 vessels attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. The activists were detained, transferred to a landing craft converted into a makeshift prison in the port of Ashdod, complete with barbed wire and shipping containers, then mass-deported to Turkey within days. Before the deportees had even landed in Istanbul, testimonies had begun to circulate.

The flotilla organisers documented at least 15 cases of sexual assault or rape among the detainees. On one vessel alone, the organisation recorded at least 12 sexual assaults, including anal rape and forcible penetration with a firearm. Several activists were hospitalised with broken ribs or fractured vertebrae. An Australian filmmaker described being beaten and sexually assaulted by five men inside a container on the Israeli prison ship. A Spanish activist recounted being restrained and subjected to repeated taser discharges across her torso and hips. Italy opened a criminal investigation for kidnapping and sexual assault. Germany acknowledged that some of the accusations made by its nationals were “serious”. The Israeli human rights organisation Adalah, which represented the activists, stated that in ten years of working with flotillas, it had never documented a comparable level of violence.

What distinguishes the flotilla case from the rest of the documentary chain is not only the severity of the acts. It is the nature of the victims. These were not Palestinians detained in Gaza or the West Bank, whose situation Tel Aviv can frame within the context of counter-terrorism operations in active conflict territory. These were foreign nationals, predominantly European, arrested in international waters where Israel has no recognised jurisdiction. The sovereignty argument that Tel Aviv systematically invokes to reject UN investigations does not apply here. The documented sexual violence aboard the flotilla did not occur within any war zone. It occurred outside any legal framework that could invoke operational necessity. Minister Ben Gvir posted a video mocking the kneeling detainees on deck while the Israeli national anthem played. It was a political communication, not an incident. It was the deliberate demonstration that a state did not consider it necessary to dissemble.

The Russian Symmetry and What It Reveals About the Language of Power

Israel is not the only new name on the 2026 list. Russian armed and security forces also appear for the first time, for sexual violence against prisoners of war and civilians detained during the conflict in Ukraine. Both countries had been warned in the August 2025 report that they could be listed if they failed to adopt corrective and transparency measures. Neither did so, and the reasons in each case are different but symmetrical in their logic. Russia did not act because it does not recognise the secretary-general’s authority on any matter concerning its military operations. Israel did not act because it trusted, for eighteen months, that diplomatic pressure and American influence would keep its name out of the document. Both miscalculated, though for different reasons.

The Russian reaction was predictable. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia announced that Russia would prepare its own report on Ukraine’s treatment of Russian prisoners of war, as though the response to a documented accusation were a parallel counter-accusation. This is the classic mechanism of equivalence diplomacy, whose purpose is not to refute the facts, but to contaminate the frame of reference until any comparison becomes impossible. The manoeuvre has limited but real short-term efficacy, particularly in a Security Council where Russia holds a veto and can block any binding consequence arising from its inclusion on the list.

The Israeli reaction was structurally different, and for that reason more revealing. Danon did not systematically contest the recorded facts. He implicitly accepted them by attacking the process that documented them. “Guterres has put Israel on the same blacklist as Hamas, ISIS and the most depraved terrorist organisations in the world,” he declared. The argument was not Israel’s innocence. It was the indignity of the comparison. The problem was not sharing a list with Russia, a nuclear power with a documented record of war crimes in Syria, Chechnya and Ukraine. The problem was the symbolic proximity to non-state actors that Israel describes as subhuman in its own public statements. Israeli diplomacy thereby revealed its true concern, which was not the accusation itself, but the implicit levelling it contains. A state that accumulates fifteen years of documented impunity has far more to lose from a classification than from a condemnation.

What the List Does and What Will Not Change

Inclusion in the CRSV annex carries no automatic legal consequences. It activates no mechanism of the International Criminal Court. It suspends no vote in the Security Council, where the United States maintains its veto over any binding resolution against Israel. It does not interrupt arms supplies, which continued to flow to Tel Aviv long after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to adopt provisional measures to prevent acts of genocide, and continued after multiple independent investigations had documented war crimes. The list is a political instrument, not a legal one. Its effect is visibility. Its limit is precisely the same as that of every accountability mechanism the international order has constructed since 1945. They are invoked, they are recorded, they are filed, but they are rarely executed.

What the 2026 report closes is a specific argument. For eighteen months, international institutions maintained an operational separation between the documentation of facts and their official recognition. That separation was not ignorance. It was administration. The facts had been established since July 2024. The Commission’s report had formalised them in March 2025. Patten’s warning had translated them into procedural language in January of that year. The dropping of charges against the Sde Teiman soldiers, in March 2026, had demonstrated that Israel’s internal justice system would produce no result. And the flotilla, intercepted in international waters nine days before the report’s publication, had extended the pattern to foreign nationals in international jurisdiction. What was missing was not evidence. It was the political will to write the name where it belonged. On 29 May 2026, that will appeared, eighteen months late, in a 35-page document listing 77 actors across twelve countries. The name was there. As it always should have been…

G.S.

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