Let's put the New York Times right up on the screen. We give you some of the headlines here.

So the headline is, UN report accuses both Israel and Palestinian groups of war crimes.

A commission produced the UN's most detailed examination yet of the October 7th attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza. Read you a little bit of this in that report released on Wednesday.

The three-person commission does not itself carry any penalties, but lays out a legal analysis of actions in the Gaza conflict that is likely to be weighed by the International Court of Justice.

In other international criminal proceedings, Israel did not cooperate with the investigation, surprise, surprise, and protested the panel's assessment of its behavior.

Some of the details here in terms of the Israeli side, they say during their months-long campaign in Gaza to oust Hamas, they have committed war crimes like the use of starvation as a weapon of war through a total siege of Gaza. The report also 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, causing disproportionate high number of civilian casualties, particularly among women and children. The conflict has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Palestinian children, a scale and a rate of casualties that were unparalleled across conflicts in recent decades. Other crimes against humanity committed by Israel include extermination, murder, gender persecution in targeting Palestinian men and boys, forcible transfer of the population, torture, and inhuman and cruel treatment. I'm going to get into some of the specific details here, which were the subject in particular of a lot of commentary and discussion online.

But just to zoom out for a second of the import of this, because you guys might be, oh, you have another UN report, who really cares? Which in one sense, okay, fair enough.

In another way that you have yet another report accusing Israel of such grave crimes against humanity, and that this is likely to weigh heavily in a future International Court of Justice ruling with regards to genocide. And also potentially the ICC may take a look at this also in terms of war crimes prosecution against Bibi Netanyahu, Yoav Golan, and potentially others in the future, by the way. That's what gives this some weight and makes it really significant.

It also carried a lot of mainstream press was forced to cover this and talk in detail about this. And it's yet another instance of Israel's increasing pariah status internationally.

Yeah. Well, and there's also a lot of other stuff, Crystal, if we want to get into about the Hannibal Directive, which they found, which is very interesting.

Yeah. So could we put the Hannibal Directive piece of this up on the screen? So the Hannibal

Directive, the basic idea, and this has been documented in the past that the Israeli military will kill their own in the process of attempting to get the bad guys or thwart hostage taking in particular. And there's already been credible reporting in places like the New York Times that there had been some instances of the Hannibal Directive being operative during the response to October 7th. Well, noteworthy in this report, you have this paragraph that says, quote, the commission also verified information indicating that in at least two other cases, the Israelis had likely applied the Hannibal Directive, resulting in the killing of up to 14 Israeli civilians. One woman was killed by ISF helicopter fire while being abducted from near Oz to Gaza by militants. In another case, the commission found that Israeli tank fire killed some or all of the 13 civilian hostages held in a house that's in that kibbutz in Biari.

That was the instance that I think has been most documented and basically admitted to by the Israelis who were involved in that operation. And witnesses, survivors, had also testified to that as well, but still noteworthy to see this confirmed in this report.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is not only has it been, I mean, this has been something that's been danced around previously, but it's important also just to underscore, remember there were some revisions about the death toll on October 7th, and it does still remain questions about specifically the Nova Music Festival to have a confirmation or at least supposed confirmation here by the

United Nations. Not nothing. Yes. And they looked into the Nova Music Festival piece as well, and they weren't able to come to a conclusion there over whether the Hannibal Directive was also operative at the Nova Music Festival. So they left that question open at this time.

Another area that they dealt with was, you know, an incredibly politically sensitive issue, which is rape and gender-based violence committed by Hamas on October 7th. And I wanted to put, this is going to be a little bit lengthy, guys, but I just want to make sure you have all of the information that was in the report so that you can know fully what this commission found. Let's go and put the first piece up on the screen. The TLDR here is that the commission found, quote, indications that members of the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed gender-based violence in several locations on October 7th. These, they say, were not isolated incidents, but perpetrated in similar ways in several locations by multiple

Palestinian perpetrators. The acts that were documented reflected, they say, clear abuse of power by male perpetrators, disregard for special considerations and protection of women's integrity.

So that's gender-based violence. Let's go to the next paragraph in the report. They indicate that

Hamas rejected those accusations. However, they get into some of the specifics of the evidence that they found of sexual violence and gender-based violence perpetrated against women in and around the Nova Festival site, as well as at a military outpost and several of the kibbutz. They say they collected and preserved digital evidence, including images of victims' bodies, displaying indications of sexual violence, a pattern corroborated by independent testimonies from witnesses. Reliable witness accounts obtained described bodies that had been undressed, in some instances with exposed genitals. They received reports and verified digital evidence concerned the restraining of women, including hands and sometimes feet of women being bound, often behind the victim's backs, prior to their abduction or killing. Additionally, the commission made assessments based on the position of the body. For example, images displaying legs spread or bent over and signs of struggle or violence on the body, such as stab wounds, burns, lacerations, and abrasions. So let's go on to the next piece. They say, however, that they looked at testimonies obtained by journalists and Israeli police concerning rape specifically, so as distinct from general gender-based violence or general sexual violence, but they were not able to independently verify those rape allegations due to lack of access to victims, witnesses in crime seats, and obstruction of investigation by Israeli authorities, commission was unable to review the unedited version of such testimonies for the same reasons commission was also unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation.

Additionally, the commission found some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate, or contradictory with other evidence or statements and discounted these from its assessment. So this is consistent with the Times of London piece that I did a monologue on earlier this week, which is effectively in terms of rape, and specifically there's another piece that speaks to this, rape being used systematically as a weapon of war with top-down instructions from military commanders to use rape as a weapon of war. There is no evidence at this point, no testimony, no forensic evidence to back up those claims. We have one more piece that speaks to this specifically. They say that the commission identified patterns indicative of sexual violence in several locations. The attack on October 7th, they say, enabled perpetrators to commit sexual and gender-based violence, and this violence was not isolated. But they say they did not find credible evidence that militants received orders to commit sexual violence, and so it was unable to make conclusions on this issue. However, they say inflammatory language, disbelief observed with both parties were silencing and discrediting survivors, further exacerbating trauma and stigmatization. So I know this was a lot to go through, but I just wanted to give all the details of what the commission report found, what they documented, what they claimed, and gives a little bit of a fuller picture of what we know at this point of what happened on October 7th, which is they found indications of gender-based violence, of sexual violence. They were able to falsify some of the journalist tellings, some of the news accounts of specific rapes. They were not able to find evidence of specific rapes. The

Israeli government continues not to cooperate, and they found no indications that this was used systematically as a weapon of war with top-down instructions, which, again, is consistent with prior reporting. Take it for what you will. Call it tedious if you want. Go ask any normie Israel supporter out there, and they're going to bring up raping the babies every single time. So if you think this stuff doesn't matter, it's kind of like going back in 2005 and being like, does it really matter that we didn't find WMD in Iraq? And it's like, no, yeah, it actually really does matter because the initial justifications for the eventual fallout, they matter a lot. And one of the very effective tactics that the Bush administration, war supporters, and all those people did is they moved past all of their lies and started architecting new ones instead of actually reconciling what really happened. We didn't get a full accounting until, what, 2010, basically, of what really went down in those initial years, and by that time, the damage was done. So I say don't ever forget. It's kind of like 9-11. Do the details of 9-11 still matter? In some sense, no. In others, we just learned two weeks ago that the Saudi government had even more to do with funding the hijackers than we knew at the time, and it was totally covered up. I would say it does matter. It matters both for the historical record and for future U.S. policy. Well, and it also matters because the Israeli government really used this as the center of their push to justify barbarism. Not just them, us too. Oh, absolutely. I mean,

Joe Biden, I showed the clip of him lying about how he saw the photographs. No, you didn't because those photographs didn't exist. So that's why your word tedious is correct. I also find it somewhat tedious, but I want to make sure that we're really clear about what we know actually happened on that day, what the evidence supports, what it doesn't support. There was one last piece that I wanted to put up here because this looked both at Israeli actions and Palestinian actions, crimes committed against Israelis and against Palestinians. There was quite a significant section about gender-based and sexual violence committed against Palestinians. We can put this up on the screen. This was a portion of it. They say that the frequency, prevalence, and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated against Palestinians since October 7th across the OPT indicate that specific forms of this type of violence are part of Israeli operating procedures. Palestinian men and boys experienced specific persecutory acts intended to punish them in retaliation for the crimes committed on October 7th. The way in which these acts were committed, including their filming and photographing in conjunction with similar cases documented in several locations leads the commission to conclude that forced public stripping and nudity and other related types of abuse were either ordered or condoned by Israeli authorities.

So they're suggesting that there may have been operating orders to humiliate Palestinian men and boys in particular and perpetrate sexual violence, gender-based violence against Palestinian men and boys in a systematic way post-October 7th to, quote unquote, get revenge for the crimes that were committed on that day. And there's quite a bit of detail in the report about some of the acts that have been reported, which again, consistent with prior reporting. We had report from previous UN reports. We also just had New York Times documenting torture and abuse against

Palestinian prisoners who've been taken by the Israelis, including multiple reports of hot electric rod being used to sodomize multiple Palestinian men. So this report provides additional detail there as well. Yeah, that's well said.

To get the full show, ad-free, and in your inbox every morning, you can sign up at BreakingPoints.com.

That's right. Get the full show. Help support the future of independent media at BreakingPoints.com.