The United Nations placed Israeli and Russian armed forces on its annual list of parties credibly suspected of committing patterns of conflict-related sexual violence on Thursday, the first time either country has appeared on the register since it was established more than 15 years ago. The Secretary-General's 35-page report, released Friday, lists 77 parties across 21 countries, 62 of them non-state actors. New additions include three non-state armed groups operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nearly 9,788 cases of conflict-related sexual violence were recorded worldwide last year, more than double the previous year's figure.
"The figures contained in this report should be understood not as the full picture but as an indication of a much broader pattern of violations that remain largely unseen and underreported," Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict and the report's author, told reporters at the UN's New York headquarters on Friday.
Perpetrators, she said, were feeling emboldened by "a context of impunity, where this crime is almost cost-free."
Both Israel and Russia had been explicitly warned. In August 2025, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put both countries on notice, citing "significant concerns regarding patterns of certain forms of sexual violence" documented in detention settings. Neither government complied with the commitments required to avoid listing.
The Conflict-Related Sexual Violence list is compiled by the Secretary-General based on cases verified by UN agencies and field investigators. It is not a political vote among member states. It does not automatically trigger sanctions, but it feeds into proceedings at the UN General Assembly, Security Council, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Parties that appear on the list repeatedly are barred from participating in UN peacekeeping operations. The report's annex contains 77 parties; more than 70 per cent of listed parties are repeat offenders, appearing for at least five consecutive years without implementing preventive measures.
Israel
The listing covers Israeli armed and security forces, including the Israel Defense Forces, the Israel Prison Service, special forces units and police. The report verified cases affecting 14 men, seven women, nine boys and one girl from Gaza and the West Bank, spanning 2023 to 2025. Thirteen cases occurred during 2025 alone; 18 dated to 2023 and 2024.
Violations documented included rape with objects, gang rape, attempted rape, physical violence targeting genital organs, deliberate shooting at genitals, unwanted touching of breasts and genitals, strip and cavity searches conducted without apparent security justification, forced nudity and threats of rape. Rape and gang rape, in some cases repeated, were committed against nine victims, most of them from Gaza. Some violations were photographed or recorded on video by the perpetrators, including one rape. The report also documented threats made by Israeli security agencies against detainees to prevent them from speaking publicly.
Abuses were recorded at multiple sites: the Sde Teiman military detention facility, the Etzion detention centre, prisons including Megiddo, Ofer, Ramla, Hasharon, Shatta, Nafha and Damon, and the Gush Etzion police station.
As an example of what the report called "systematic lack of accountability," it cited the case of a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman who suffered severe rectal injuries in July 2024 after a soldier stabbed him in the buttocks, causing a punctured lung and broken ribs. Five reserve soldiers from Unit 100 were indicted in February 2025. Video footage and medical reports existed. All charges were dropped in March 2026 by Military Advocate General Itay Offir, who cited "exceptional and unprecedented circumstances" in the law enforcement system's conduct. The UN warned the decision "could reinforce a climate of impunity and enable further acts of sexual violence."
The UN considers the 31 verified cases "indicative of a broader pattern extending over prolonged periods," noting that Israel's refusal to grant monitors access has made a full accounting impossible. Patten stated plainly at Friday's briefing: "I never received an iota of information on measures taken by the government of Israel on implementation of the preventive measures."
Israel's position on the access question is disputed. Ambassador Danny Danon said the country had invited UN representatives to come and verify the allegations, and they chose not to come. Patten confirmed an invitation had existed but said the visit was ultimately suspended because of Israel's war on Gaza and because of unresolved disagreements over scope and access.
The listing was not the first time the UN had confronted Israeli detention practices since October 2023. In December 2025, the UN Committee Against Torture found credible evidence that Israel was operating a "de facto State policy of organised and widespread torture and ill-treatment," warning the practices may constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity and may meet the legal criteria for genocide. Methods documented in that review included severe beatings, electrocution of the genitals and anus, waterboarding, prolonged stress positions, sexual violence including rape, forced nudity and sexual threats, use of attack dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures, and detainees being urinated on or made to act like animals. Thousands were shackled at all times, blindfolded and fed through a straw.
In March 2026, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese told the Human Rights Council that "torture has effectively become state policy" in Israel and that life in occupied Palestinian territory amounted to "a continuum of physical and mental suffering." More than 18,500 Palestinians had been detained since October 2023, including at least 1,500 children. Nearly 100 detainees had died in custody.
The methods recorded in Israel's detention system since October 2023 have a documented predecessor. Mustafa Dirani, a Lebanese militia leader kidnapped by Israeli commandos in southern Lebanon in 1994, testified before a Tel Aviv court in 2004 that Shin Bet interrogators kept him naked in an interrogation facility for a month, questioned him around the clock, splashed him alternately with hot and freezing water, shook him until he fainted, squeezed his testicles, sodomised him and sexually assaulted him with a stick. He identified the interrogator from a photograph. An IDF doctor's examination, reported by the Jerusalem Post, found physical evidence consistent with his account. Israel's Supreme Court dismissed his lawsuit in 2015, ruling he had no recourse to Israeli courts because he had rejoined a designated organisation after his release. The court did not rule on the substance of the allegation.
An academic study published in the peer-reviewed record analysed a database of 517 former male Palestinian detainees and found a documented pattern of sexual torture by Israeli interrogation and law enforcement authorities between 2005 and 2012. Nine per cent of victims were minors. The same study noted that Israel's Supreme Court had in 1999 banned specific interrogation methods outright, while simultaneously ruling that interrogators using physical methods in purported emergency situations might be exempt from prosecution, effectively building impunity into the legal framework.
Russia
The UN verified 310 cases of conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated by Russian armed and security forces against prisoners of war and civilian detainees in Russia and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine since 2022. The verified cases affected 280 men, 26 women and four girls. Documented violations included rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, electric shocks and beatings to the genitals. The majority occurred in detention; 279 of the 310 took place in custody settings. Russian authorities consistently denied access to UN investigators throughout the documentation period, though investigators were still able to verify all 310 cases.
Human rights monitors in Ukraine documented a further 31 cases of conflict-related sexual violence against prisoners of war and civilian detainees, the majority of which occurred before 2025. Ukraine has not been placed on the blacklist.
The scale of verified sexual violence against Ukrainian POWs in Russian custody had already been established well before the blacklisting. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, in its February 2025 three-year assessment, found that 95 per cent of released Ukrainian POWs interviewed had provided accounts of torture or severe ill-treatment. Around 80 per cent of former POWs reported sexual violence. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in October 2024 that Russian authorities had committed torture against Ukrainian civilians and POWs as a crime against humanity and that the practice was both widespread and systematic. High-ranking detention facility officials were directly involved; lower-ranking personnel acted on orders; perpetrators acted with an apparent sense of impunity.
Individual testimony before UN investigators included accounts of electric shocks applied with a taser to the genitals on at least six separate occasions. Methods recorded across multiple reporting periods included rape and gang rape, forced nudity and forced public stripping, sexual torture, dog bites, suffocation, mock executions, prolonged stress positions and sleep deprivation. These patterns were consistent from 2022 through to the most recent reporting period.
What distinguishes the Russia listing is not merely the scale of the current documentation but the continuity with a prior, separately documented conflict. During the Chechen wars of 1994 to 1996 and 1999 to 2009, Russian forces carried out documented patterns of sexual violence that in method are substantively identical to what UN investigators have verified in Ukraine.
The Chernokozovo filtration camp became the best-documented site of the second Chechen war. Human Rights Watch investigators established that men and women held there in January 2000 were raped and sexually assaulted with police batons. Detainees were forced to run a corridor of baton-wielding guards as they entered. Most were released only after families paid substantial sums to Russian officials. At checkpoints, Human Rights Watch documented the rape of two women at the main Kavkaz border crossing in late January 2000. In the village of Aldi on 5 February 2000, reports emerged of soldiers gang-raping four women and strangling three of them, leaving the fourth for dead.
At filtration camps and checkpoints across Chechnya, documented methods used against male detainees included forced nudity, electric shock torture on the genitals and anal rape with truncheons or guns. Those findings were recorded by the International Federation for Human Rights, Amnesty International and the Russian human rights organisation Memorial. A study of 35 Chechen asylum seekers treated at the Medical Foundation in London found 16 of 19 women and one man had disclosed rape during treatment; in 13 cases the alleged perpetrators were Russian soldiers, in three cases Russian police officers.
Human Rights Watch noted at the time that Russia resisted any meaningful accountability process, that law enforcement agencies failed to launch serious investigations into most cases, and that the failure to investigate "fostered an atmosphere of impunity among Russian troops." No Russian military personnel were prosecuted for sexual violence in Chechnya. No Russian military personnel have been prosecuted for sexual violence in Ukraine.
The methods, the locations, the impunity and the denial of investigator access form a continuous documented record across more than 30 years. The 310 cases verified for the CRSV blacklist represent what the UN itself describes as the verifiable tip of a substantially larger pattern.
Reactions
Israel's response was immediate, with Ambassador Danny Danon announcing the country was cutting contact with Secretary-General Guterres' office.
"We are done with this UN Secretary-General," Danon said. "Guterres has put Israel on the same blacklist along with Hamas, ISIS and the most depraved terrorist organizations in the world."
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein called the listing "shameful and absurd" and said it was "further proof of the UN's true nature: a politicised and corrupt organisation that has abandoned its founding principles and systematically targets Israel as its primary mission."
The move followed a prior rupture. In 2024, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz had declared Guterres persona non grata after Guterres said the October 7 attacks did not occur "in a vacuum." Danon's announcement extended and formalised that break.
US Ambassador Mike Waltz publicly aligned with Israel, saying the listing put it "on the same level as terrorist organizations like Hamas and ISIS which DELIBERATELY target civilians for sexual violence as a weapon of terror."
Guterres' spokesperson Stephane Dujarric described Israel's break as "more symbolic than anything," saying the organisation would "continue to work with the Israeli mission" and that "the secretary-general's door remains open to Israeli representatives, as to the other 192 member states and the two observer states."
Russia's UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia dismissed the findings as "unsubstantiated lies and alleged things which again portray Russia as a villain." He said Russia would write to Guterres rejecting the findings and was preparing its own report on Ukrainian treatment of Russian prisoners of war.
UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls Reem Alsalem said the listing of Israel was "long overdue," and noted she had previously expressed disappointment that Israel had not been listed earlier.
Oleksii Sivak, founder of the Ukrainian NGO Alumni, which supports male survivors of torture, responded to Russia's listing: "We did it. I often heard that it was impossible, but there were people who believed in us and made every effort to make the impossible possible. For the state, this is a major mechanism for fighting Russia in international forums. But this is only the first step towards real justice."
Guterres' second and final term ends 31 December. Israel said it would wait until a new Secretary-General is appointed before restoring contact with his office. Russia has not indicated any intent to engage with the findings.
