The controversy surrounding allegations of sexual violence in detention facilities during the Gaza war has pushed the debate over accountability inside Israel into one of its most sensitive phases, where legal scrutiny, political defensiveness, and restricted access to conflict zones collide. The inclusion of Israel in a UN conflict-related sexual violence list, based on 31 documented cases involving alleged rape, gang rape, and other forms of abuse against Palestinian detainees, has not only escalated diplomatic tensions but also sharpened long-standing questions about whether credible oversight can exist in conditions where independent monitoring is limited and investigative transparency remains contested.
Many of the claims raised by the UN in its report are reported to have taken place within military detention centers or under the purview of the Israel Prison Service, which remains hard to monitor. It is stated that the ICRC, which often acts as an important player in the process of monitoring detention during warfare, has encountered certain restrictions in accessing Palestinian prisoners since October 7. Restrictions on access in these instances have often been justified on the grounds of security and reciprocity, especially regarding the access to hostages. However, as the hostage-taking dynamics have changed over the course of the war, many believe that the current restrictions are no longer necessary.
The problem of access is not technical, but foundational. Detention centers in war zones have always been identified by the global community of international law experts as a particularly dangerous area for abuse due to their lack of transparency to external examination. It is the very framework of the law of humanitarian intervention that presupposes the function of the outside monitoring of detention centers, be it done by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross or impartial health care professionals or any other official body, as a tool of preventing abuses and verifying compliance with regulations.
The UN’s decision to include Israel in its report reflects this broader tension between evidentiary certainty and institutional judgment. According to the findings, the documented cases include severe forms of alleged sexual violence in detention-related contexts. Israeli officials have strongly rejected these conclusions, characterizing them as biased and politically motivated, and argue that the UN’s methodology fails to adequately account for the security conditions prevailing after the October 7 attacks. This divergence is emblematic of a long-standing pattern in which Israel’s engagement with UN investigative mechanisms has been marked by contestation, particularly in relation to conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories and during periods of active military conflict. The result is a widening gap between institutional assessments based on aggregated reports and state-level rejection grounded in security framing and procedural objections.
The issue that cannot be ignored any longer, however, is how the reaction to these claims is becoming increasingly characterized by procedural manipulation, defensiveness, and political reinterpretation, rather than by straightforward rebuttal. Instead of engaging with the central issue of verification, Israeli officials have continued to respond to all criticism with blanket denials of UN competence, while keeping in place a set of circumstances under which outside verification is practically impossible. The result is that the verification process is made impossible through limited access; access is limited because it is necessary for verification; and the impossibility of verification serves as an excuse for denying the findings.
This situation is especially problematic with regard to detention centers, given that international law imposes the greatest obligation to transparency on those with custody over detainees. The lack of regular and unhampered access by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as limitations on media coverage and inspections, is more than an issue of process, but instead casts serious doubt about the ability to ensure the prevention and investigation of abuses. Where the detainee is wholly at the mercy of his captor for communication, opacity itself constitutes the problem.
Given this situation, one can see that the internal Israeli system of overseeing matters has become more performative than a corrective measure. Although there have been efforts to create a robust framework of laws and regulations, its ability to function effectively has been hindered by factors such as political influence and lack of accountability in significant cases. The case of the former Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi provides evidence of this contradiction: instead of strengthening the independence of institutions, she herself has become an example of the larger picture of a legal official being vulnerable to political reprisal because of military misconduct investigations.
More generally, the political atmosphere created through individuals like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has resulted in further loss of faith in the impartiality of the detention regime. The glorification of harsh imprisonment conditions and the outright dismissal of monitoring organizations as the enemy demonstrate a political system where punitive detention measures are not an accidental byproduct but a deliberate political goal. In such a system, the line between legal imprisonment and abuse is easily blurred, especially when there is interference in institutional processes.
The consequence is that Israel’s claims of adherence to the rule of law increasingly ring hollow in the absence of conditions that allow those claims to be tested. Rule of law is not measured by the existence of legal codes or military advocate offices alone, but by demonstrable willingness to subject state conduct to independent scrutiny, even when politically inconvenient.
Ultimately, the UN listing is not the source of Israel’s reputational crisis, it is the reflection of an already deepening structural deficit in accountability. The harder Israel pushes against scrutiny without expanding access, the more it reinforces the perception that scrutiny is precisely what it fears. In international law, legitimacy is not derived from authority alone but from openness to challenge. And when a state governs detention in conditions of sustained opacity while rejecting external verification, it should not be surprised when the world stops treating its denials as decisive. Instead, those denials become part of the evidence of a system that demands trust while steadily withdrawing the conditions that make trust possible.