Palestinian Women 'Raped by Israeli Soldiers.' Silence From Western Media
Powerful new testimony reveals Western hypocrisy is alive and well – rape is only a crime and an outrage when it serves Western political interests.
A note from our editor-in-chief:
This op-ed from the one and only Fatima Bhutto is so important for Zeteo subscribers to read. Fatima cites shocking testimony about rape and sexual assault in the Middle East that has been ignored by all of our major ‘mainstream’ media outlets. Zeteo is publishing portions of that testimony. A warning: this piece contains graphic descriptions that some readers may find disturbing.
- Mehdi
“We have also documented a case of gang rape… on a woman……She said she was filmed during the assault… [they] stripped her, kept beating her in her genitals … humiliated her for four hours. She said the cameras were recording the whole time.”
The average Westerner who reads only mainstream media coverage of the Middle East might think this is what Hamas fighters did to Israeli women on Oct. 7.
But actually, it's what Israeli troops are alleged to have done to Palestinian women.
Earlier this month, Kifeya Khraim from the Palestinian NGO the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC) and another advocate for Palestinian women, who was not named, testified at a UN Commission of Inquiry on the Palestinian women facing “systematic sexual violence and intimidation by Israeli forces.” Khraim began her statement by recounting the story of a home invasion in the occupied West Bank in July 2023 when female Israeli soldiers with large dogs forced Palestinian women to undress and “made [them] walk around the house naked.”
Women are routinely sexually abused during home invasions by the Israeli military. They’re forced to disrobe – sometimes in front of their male relatives – and adopt humiliating poses for the soldiers to film them, Khraim said. During some West Bank home invasions, the other advocate testified, Israeli soldiers touched Palestinian women sexually and threatened them with rape, all while their male relatives were handcuffed. The soldiers “make sexual noises and gestures, threaten to rape [the woman] even, doing this in front of [her male relatives] while they're being handcuffed or blindfolded, not able to stop it, not able to protect [their] daughter, sister, whatever it may be. It's a form to not only control the woman, but also control the men as well, and break up the family and, in turn, break up society as a whole.”
These advocates’ testimony is so shocking and horrific that it should have been front-page news around the world and sparked global feminist outrage. Instead, it was resolutely ignored by the Western press, white feminists, and politicians across Europe and the United States. While major media outlets such as the BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post published stories referencing, in broad terms, a UN report that came out just after the testimony on “Israel's systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence” since Oct. 7, none of them cited or bothered to mention any of Khraim's devastating testimony. Surely, such detailed revelations, and specific allegations of rape and gang rape, warrant their own story?
Gang Rape, A Soldier Exposed His Genitals
“Rape was mainly done by Israeli female officers inserting objects inside genitals” of the detained, Khraim testified. The female Israeli soldiers raped both men and women, photographing and often filming the assaults. The advocates heard from Palestinian women who said they had been gang raped while detained.
“What these testimonies reveal was a systematic trend of sexual violence that was being used as a weapon of genocide.”
-Women’s advocate at the UN
One woman, Khraim said, was raped by a female soldier who inserted objects into the victim’s rectum. In another incident, women and men who had been abducted at a checkpoint while fleeing Gaza through a supposed safety corridor were forcibly disappeared and held in a Negev detention center where they were made to strip, after which the Israeli military opened the doors to Israeli civilians who photographed the detainees, mocked them and jeered at them. Many of the Palestinian women who had been detained by the Israeli military in the last year and a half were beaten on their genitals so frequently that advocates determined it was Israeli policy to treat Palestinian women in this sadistic manner.
“What these testimonies reveal was a systematic trend of sexual violence that was being used as a weapon of genocide,” the unnamed advocate testified.
Khraim described women who were fleeing Israel’s bombing with whatever belongings they could carry being stopped at checkpoints in Gaza and looted. The soldiers would “make them fully undress and touch them, touch their bras and molest them in the way to get the jewelry and the expensive stuff out of their undergarments.”
It’s not just at checkpoints in Gaza. Women are often sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at West Bank checkpoints, too, the advocates said. Palestinian women avoid at least one checkpoint in Hebron because a soldier is known to expose his genitals to Palestinians there. “Come, take a look. Come touch it,” the Israeli soldier told one Palestinian woman in Arabic while exposing himself, according to Khraim.
“I haven't heard of this before,” a clearly shocked Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer and member of the three-person UN Commission of Inquiry, said at one point.
A 14-year-old girl who passes through a checkpoint on her way to school told WCLAC Israeli soldiers “pretended to be searching her” and “they started touching her, touching her breasts, touching her inappropriately.” This young girl, Khraim said “is terrified to go to school anymore.”
Though this testimony was collected after October 7, 2023, Israel has used sexual violence against women since 1948 “as a means to ethnically cleanse Palestinians,” the unnamed advocate told Sidoti.