The UN Just Condemned a Single Nation for Women's Rights Violations. Can You Guess Which One?

If there's one nation on the planet that abuses women, it's...Israel?

That's what the United Nations seems to believe, at least.

The U.N.'s Commission on the Status of Women released nine official documents over the course of its annual meeting this week, but as Ynetnews reported, only one of the U.N.'s 193 member nations was singled out for a reprimand: Israel.

Female Israeli soldiers during a combat fitness competition in 2010. (Image via Israel Defense Forces/flickr)

Rather than focus on rampant female genital mutilation in Somalia or Saudi Arabia's treatment of women as second-class citizens who can't even drive themselves to the hospital, the U.N. took aim at Israel in a report titled, "Situation of and assistance to Palestinian women."

The report blames the Israeli occupation of the West Bank for "[h]igh levels of unemployment and poverty" among Palestinians that hit women especially hard.

In a 2014 World Economic Forum report on women's political empowerment worldwide, Israel ranked 49th worldwide, compared to the U.S. at No. 54.

Majority-Muslim nations including Egypt, Yemen, Qatar and Iran dominated the bottom of the rankings.

Days before the end of the conference, Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, lambasted the U.N. for singling out Israel, writing:

Not Syria. Where government forces routinely employ rape and other sexual violence and torture against women as a tactic of war. Not Saudi Arabia. Where women are physically punished if not wearing compulsory clothing. Not Sudan. Where domestic violence is not prohibited. There is no minimum age for “consensual” sex. Not Iran. Where every woman who registered as a presidential candidate in the last election was disqualified.

Ynetnews reported that the Israeli foreign ministry described the U.N. report as, "yet another testimony to the hypocrisy of UN members."

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