Kit Klarenberg
Source: Al Mayadeen English
The UN Human Rights Commission's report exposes systematic sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians, describing it as a deliberate policy aimed at dehumanization and suppression, with widespread impunity and official endorsement.
The report records, “sexual and gender-based violence is by no means a new element of the Israeli occupation.” However, in the wake of October 7th, there has been a “sharp increase in sexual violence against Palestinian women and men”, both by Zionist Occupation Forces (ZoF) and settlers. The UN encountered no obstacles collecting voluminous highly incriminating evidence of this vile abuse. In addition to a welter of victim and witness testimony, perpetrators often voyeuristically captured themselves and their confederates openly committing these crimes on camera.
Frequently, these abhorrent images were pridefully posted on the culprits’ personal social media accounts. Such actions amply attest to the culture of total impunity in which ZOF soldiers literally rape and pillage. “Despite the abundance of witness and digital evidence of Israeli soldiers committing crimes in Gaza,” the UN found “there have been no meaningful efforts by Israel to hold the perpetrators accountable.” Requests submitted to Tel Aviv for clarity on investigations into sexual violence committed by Occupation Forces have been ignored:
“The Commission has not seen any evidence that Israeli authorities have taken any effective measures to prevent or stop acts of sexual violence or to identify and punish perpetrators.”
By contrast, the UN documented multiple statements by Zionist entity officials actively supporting ZOF militants accused of sex crimes, and “legitimizing rape and other forms of sexual violence” against Palestinians, particularly detainees. That Israel’s rulers advocate sexually-charged attacks on Palestinians is further reinforced by a deliberate ZOF strike on a women’s rights centre in Gaza, in mid-November 2023. The UN noted the broadside’s “clear gendered dimension,” with soldiers daubing deeply offensive, sexist insults directed at Palestinian women on the building’s inner walls in Hebrew.
Outside, ZOF tanks precisely blitzed the building’s fifth floor, which provided shelter for women and families. That area was “completely destroyed”, but the rest of the building “remained intact”. Mercifully, the site and its surrounding area had been evacuated well in advance of the attack, meaning no one was harmed. The Commission “did not find any military justification” for the ZOF’s targeting of the centre. Yet, from the Zionist entity’s perspective, it undoubtedly served a very specific military purpose.
Collectively, the Commission’s conclusions point ineluctably to the fact that sexuality and gender are now key, dedicated battlegrounds in Israel’s unending erasure of the Palestinians, while sexual abuse, rape, and resultant physical and psychological trauma are entrenched, well-honed weapons in the Zionist entity’s Mephistophelian military arsenal. Gravely, given Tel Aviv’s tendency to export its tools and methods of repression and mass murder abroad, the implications of this grotesque evolution in modern warfare could be global.
‘Foreign Devices’
The UN Commission report contains five separate sections on the Zionist entity’s weaponisation of sexual abuse; “sexual harassment and public shaming of Palestinian women”; “filming and photographing acts of sexual violence against men and boys during arrest”; “sexual violence during ground operations including at checkpoints and evacuations”; “sexual, reproductive and other gender-based violence in detention”; “sexual and gender-based violence by settlers and other civilians.” Each is rife with repulsive descriptions, and stomach-churning attestations.
While ranking circles of hell is a tawdry task, the section detailing sexual violence directed towards male and female Palestinian detainees is most vital to examine. The sheer scale of abuses documented, and consistency of accounts provided by victims imprisoned in over 10 separate Israeli military detention facilities, means it cannot be plausibly argued this savagery is aberrational, or attributable to ‘rogue’ ZOF militants or units. It can only be deliberate, determined policy, signed off and directed at the highest levels.
From October 7th 2023 until July 2024, the UN Commission finds at least 14,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank - among them hundreds of women - were incarcerated by the ZOF. Many were not informed of the reasons for their imprisonment. In case after case, “sexual violence was used as a means of punishment and intimidation from the moment of arrest and throughout [their] detention, including during interrogations and searches”:
“Acts of sexual violence…appear to have been motivated by extreme hatred towards the Palestinian people and a desire to dehumanize and punish them…Forced nudity, with the aim of degrading and humiliating victims in front of both soldiers and other detainees, was frequently used…Male detainees reported ZOF personnel had beaten, kicked, pulled or squeezed their genitals, often while they were naked…In some cases, objects such as metal detectors and batons were used to brutalise them while they were naked.”
The Commission documented widespread rape and sexual assault of male detainees, “including the use of an electrical probe to cause burns to the anus, and the insertion of objects, such as fingers, sticks, broomsticks and vegetables, into the anus and rectum.” One victim was suspended from the ceiling so only his toes touched a chair below, and beaten with tools for hours. During the abuse, a “metal stick” was inserted into his penis roughly 20 times until he began bleeding, before fainting.
The Commission has determined that detainees were routinely subjected to sexual abuse and harassment, and that threats of sexual assault and rape were directed at detainees or their female family members. The Commission received information about detainees being forced to undress and lie on top of each other while subjected to verbal abuse and forced to curse their mothers. They were beaten if they did not comply.
Female detainees were also subjected to sexual harassment, assault, rape, and threats to their lives. One was told by a ZOF soldier he would kill her and burn her children, asking: “How do you want us to rape you? One by one or all together?”. Another was threatened with sexual assault in front of her husband, before soldiers spat in her face and beat her until she fainted. Several Palestinian women suffered the heinous indignity of “foreign devices” being inserted into their vaginas or rectums.
Female detainees moreover endured “repeated, prolonged and invasive strip searches, both before and after interrogations.” One Palestinian woman was strip searched in her cell every three hours during her four-day detention, “even though she was menstruating.” Women were regularly forced to remove all their clothes, including veils, in front of male and female ZOF soldiers. Beatings and harassment, while being bombarded with foul insults and sexual slurs, such as “bitch” and “whore”, were also commonplace.
‘Terrible Injustice’
In July 2024, 10 ZOF soldiers were arrested after subjecting a male Palestinian detainee to such vicious sexual violence, he required urgent surgery. The Commission finds this was by no means an isolated incident since October 7th, but it remains the only instance to date of a victim’s tormentors facing repercussions for their unconscionable abuse. Still, the UN refers to this sordid case as “an illustrative example of the culture of impunity” rampant within the Zionist entity’s military and security apparatus:
“Five soldiers were released without charge within a few days and five others were placed under house arrest. In September 2024, a military court eased the conditions of their house arrest, removing the requirement for them to be accompanied by a supervisor during their night-time house arrest and allowing them to submit requests for release during the holidays.”
A since-published indictment records how the five accused soldiers burst into the man’s cell at Sde Teiman detention facility, beat him with batons and tasered him in the head, before forcibly inserting a baton into his mouth, all while intimidating him with a dog. He was also stabbed in the rectum with a sharp object. The attack left the Palestinian with several fractured ribs, a punctured lung, and other life-threatening injuries.
Unmentioned in the report, the initial arrest of the 10 ZOF soldiers responsible for this gruesome barbarity elicited outrage among Israeli citizens, leading to mass protests demanding their release. Nonetheless, the Commission did record how several high-ranking Zionist entity officials expressed outrage at the soldiers’ arrests. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said they had suffered “terrible injustice”. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir stated it was “shameful” that Tel Aviv’s “best heroes” had been subject to such “vicious persecution.”
The Western media remained deathly silent on this open championing of rape as an instrument of terror. The UN Commission’s disturbing findings have likewise fallen on mainstream deaf ears. As ever, news outlets, and the Zionist entity’s Western puppet masters, are complicit by their silence - and it is precisely this silence that encourages and safeguards the ZOF’s culture of impunity. As a result, we can expect the “sharp increase in sexual violence against Palestinian women and men” to only increase in future.
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