For the first time in the institution's history, the United Nations has formally listed the Israel Defense Forces among parties credibly accused of conflict-related sexual violence — placing the Jewish state's military in the same category as Russian forces in Ukraine, a designation that carries no legal penalty but enormous symbolic weight.
Secretary-General António Guterres's 2025 annual report on sexual violence in conflict, released this week, names the IDF alongside Russian armed forces for documented patterns of abuse. The listing follows months of investigation into allegations stemming from Israel's Gaza operations and detention practices. For Israel, which has long positioned itself as the Middle East's lone liberal democracy operating under the rule of law, the designation is not merely embarrassing — it is existentially dissonant with the national self-image.
The mechanics of naming
The UN's sexual violence blacklist is not a court finding. It is a reputational mechanism, a way of concentrating diplomatic pressure on states and non-state actors whose forces have been credibly implicated in rape, sexual slavery, or related crimes during armed conflict. Inclusion triggers no sanctions, no prosecutions, no asset freezes. What it triggers is something arguably more durable: a permanent entry in the institutional memory of the international community.
Previous iterations of the list have named the usual suspects — militias in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Boko Haram, ISIS. Russia's addition last year for abuses in Ukraine was significant but unsurprising given the documented scale of atrocities in occupied territories. Israel's inclusion is different. This is a treaty ally of the United States, a recipient of billions in annual military aid, a country whose diplomats have spent decades cultivating the narrative that the IDF is the world's most moral army.
Jerusalem's response and the American silence
Israeli officials have denounced the listing as politically motivated, part of what they describe as a systematic UN bias against the Jewish state. Foreign Minister Israel Katz called the report "a moral obscenity" and summoned the UN's representative in Israel for a formal rebuke. The Israeli government points to its own military justice system, which it says investigates and prosecutes misconduct.
More notable than Israel's predictable fury is the muted response from Washington. The Biden administration, which would have issued a thunderous defense of Israeli conduct, is gone. The current White House, consumed by its Iran diplomacy and wary of expending political capital on a Middle East ally whose domestic politics have drifted rightward, has offered only a tepid statement noting that the US "takes all allegations of misconduct seriously" and "encourages transparent investigations." That is not a defense. That is diplomatic abandonment dressed in procedural language.
Our take
The UN blacklist is a blunt instrument, and Israel is not wrong that the institution has often treated it with special hostility. But the IDF's inclusion is not a fabrication conjured from anti-Zionist animus — it reflects documented allegations that Israel's own civil society organizations have raised. The real question is not whether the listing is fair but whether Israel's government, now dominated by figures who view international law as a constraint to be circumvented rather than a norm to be upheld, has any interest in the kind of accountability that might eventually remove the designation. The early evidence suggests it does not.
