From +972 Magazine
Despite mounting evidence of the army’s gender-based crimes, Israeli women’s groups have largely ignored or denied the UN’s damning new report.
Last month, a report for the UN Human Rights Council affirmed — as Palestinians have long asserted — that Israel has systematically employed sexual violence and gender-based crimes against Palestinian women, men, and children since October 7.
The investigation, released alongside harrowing testimonies from survivors and witnesses, civil society representatives, academics, lawyers, and medical experts during a two-day hearing in Geneva, reached several key conclusions that, in my view, demand immediate global attention and action.
First, Israeli forces’ use of gender-based violence has escalated dramatically in both scale and intensity since October 7, becoming “systematic.” These crimes have become a tool of collective oppression to dismantle Palestinian families and communities from within — a tactic borrowed from other campaigns of ethnic violence and genocide in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, Nigeria, and Iraq, where women’s bodies became battlegrounds.
Second, Israeli military detention facilities have become the epicenters of the most egregious kinds of gender-based violence. Beyond the widely circulated images of stripped Palestinian prisoners in Gaza, the report recorded testimonies from facilities like Sde Teiman, where prisoners, stripped of legal protections and far from the view of the media, have faced rape, sexual degradation, and torture. In some cases, like that of the doctor Adnan Al-Bursh, the prisoners died reportedly as a direct result of the sexual abuse they suffered while in custody.
Third, the report documents the proliferation of gender-based violence against Palestinians in the digital realm. Vulnerable groups, particularly women and youth, have faced shaming, doxing and exploitation of their sexual orientation or private behavior as tools of coercion and intimidation.
Fourth, the report noted that the use of gender-based violence wasn’t limited to soldiers; Israeli settlers, often acting under the protection of the army, sexually harassed Palestinian women in the West Bank, exploiting traditional gender roles within Palestinian society as a method of oppression.
Samah Salaime is a feminist Palestinian activist, social worker, researcher and writer.