Hello and a warm welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service.

I'm Celia Hatton coming to you live from London.

We've received more detail today on a UN-backed independent report that's picking apart the actions of both Israel and Hamas.

It looks at the first few months following the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israelis. The report initially

released a week ago was the latest set of findings from the UN-backed Commission of Inquiry that's

been in place for more than three years.

Both Israel and Hamas declined to cooperate with the Commission's latest investigation,

but in its report, it found both sides were responsible for indiscriminately at targeting civilians

and for using sexual violence and torture.

Israel, the report says, also use starvation as a tactic of war.

The report's lead investigator, Navi Pile, is the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In a rare interview, she explained her group's key findings.

For the October 7th report, the team captured all the information on social media.

We called for submissions, interviewed witnesses, and came up with violations committed by Hamas and Palestinian

armed groups together with some Palestinian civilians.

And we now deemed all those acts as war crimes.

We report up to 31st December on Israel's attack on Gaza and Palestinian territories.

We set out the facts and say,

these are war crimes, the crimes against humanity.

And they are violations of international human rights law as well.

How did you go about compiling this report?

What access did you have to both sides to Hamas, to the actions of Hamas and also to the actions

of the Israelis?

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