Israel Abuse of Women
Updated 2024-04-03
2024-02-23 State Dept downplays reports of Israeli soldiers sexually abusing, slaughtering Palestinian women While falsely claiming to have received “independent confirmation” of since-debunked assertions of mass rape by Hamas, the State Department’s spokesman said he “cannot independently verify” allegations by UN human rights experts that Israeli soldiers have sexually abused and systematically slaughtered Palestinian women and girls in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The US State Department has downplayed the findings of UN human rights experts who received “credible allegations” that Israeli soldiers have raped, tortured, and executed Palestinian women and girls amid their siege of Gaza. US media has similarly overlooked the UN human rights report, focusing instead on yet another dubious report by the Israeli Association of Rape Crisis Centers alleging the deployment of “systematic sexual violence” by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported, the Israeli report was “short on new research, absent of hard evidence, and reliant instead on clips from factually-challenged articles by the same Western outlets promoting its publication.” Its publication was funded by US-based Israel lobby heavyweights involved in a public relations scheme to justify the ongoing siege of Gaza.
The UN’s Office of the High Commission on Human Rights reported receiving testimonies from Palestinian women and girls in Israeli custody of rape and being “subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers.” https://thegrayzone.com/2024/02/23/state-dept-israeli-soldiers-sexually-abusing-slaughtering-palestinian-women/
2023-12-18 Hamas ‘mass rape’ claim lacks evidence. But it’s being used to justify genocide This article is intended as a follow-up to my last article, on the western media’s refusal to investigate what happened on October 7. As I argued there, journalists are suppressing evidence from credible sources, including the Israeli military, suggesting that Israel was responsible for many of the deaths of its citizens that day, including those whose charred remains are regularly cited as proof of barbarism by Hamas – and by implication, all Palestinians.
My previous article makes the point that these allegations against Hamas are being used to justify a genocidal bombing campaign that it is known to have killed so far more than 19,000 Palestinians, a majority of them women and children, as well as an ethnic cleansing campaign that has driven some 2 million Palestinians from their homes and left them exposed to disease and starvation in a tiny area, pressed up against the short border with Egypt. The goal is obvious: to push Palestinians out of Gaza and into Sinai.
The reason why Israel’s apologists for genocide need to inflate their claim is because, sadly, opportunistic rape would be entirely unremarkable in any violent, militarized situation – and indeed unremarkable in behaviors towards women in western societies in general.
It would mean that any sexual violence against Israeli women that occurred on October 7 was as representative of a general Palestinian savagery as sexual violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian women – examples can be found here and here – is of a general Israeli savagery. Which is not at all
The same Israelis and westerners who express concern that Israeli women are fearful of coming forward to tell of their experiences on October 7, as Elkayam-Levy stresses, have in the past shown precisely zero concern that Palestinian women, who live under a belligerent military occupation, have been fearful for decades of telling of their experiences at the hands of unaccountable Israeli soldiers.
However, unlike the lack of evidence that Hamas ordered rape as a weapon of war, we do have evidence – from the Israeli media – that an Israeli military leader encouraged Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian women to “boost morale”. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/hamas-mass-rape-claim-lacks-evidence
2023-09-12 The untold story of the abuse of Palestinian women in Hebron The humiliation of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers in the occupied city of Al Khalil (Hebron) on July 10 was not the first such episode. Sadly, it will not be the last. Indeed, the stripping of five women in front of their children, parading them naked around their family home and then stealing their jewelry by an Israeli military unit, was not a random act. It deserves deep reflection.
Palestinians rightly understood the event, investigated at length by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, in a report published on September 5, as an intentional Israeli policy.
The B’Tselem investigation was damning. “Dozens of masked soldiers, with dogs” raided the ‘Ajlouni family in southern Hebron, B’Tselem said. They “handcuffed three family members”, including a minor, “separated men from women and children, and began an extensive search of them and their home”. The humiliating episode was yet to follow, as “masked female soldiers” threatened a mother with a dog and forced her to strip completely naked in front of her children. The degrading treatment was repeated against four other women, as they were forced to move, naked, from room to room. Other soldiers, meanwhile, were busy stealing the family’s jewelry, according to the report.
Corporate Western media ignored the investigation, although it enthusiastically reported on the retaliatory attacks on Israeli occupation soldiers by Palestinian youth in Jericho and Jerusalem, providing little or no context to what they perceived to be “Palestinian terrorism”. But the Hebron women and the ‘Ajlouni family are the actual victims of terrorism, Israeli terrorism.
Though the Hebron incident is a repeat of numerous violations of Palestinian rights and dignity spanning many years, there is still much we can learn from it. Humiliating Palestinians is an actual Israeli policy and cannot be attributed to “a few bad apples” in an otherwise “most moral army in the world”.
This assertion can easily be demonstrated by a quick comparison of the behavior of Zionist militias during the Nakba (1947-48) to later episodes, and, eventually, to the recent events in Hebron. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” provides illuminating, although difficult-to-read passages on the rape of Palestinian women during those horrific years. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last year that sensitive references were purposely removed from unclassified Israeli military documents concerning the events that led to the Nakba. https://jordantimes.com/opinion/ramzy-baroud/untold-story-abuse-palestinian-women-hebron
2021-10-20 IDF removes gag on 2016 conviction of officer for raping Palestinian woman Military had long barred outlets from publishing information about the case, a decision that was was largely overturned this week following appeal by Ynet news site.
An Israeli military officer who has been imprisoned since 2017 was convicted of raping a Palestinian woman, as well as committing sexual assault against other Palestinian women and a man and extorting them for sexual favors, among other crimes, a military court permitted news outlets to report on Wednesday, ending a years-long gag order on the case. The officer, whose name remains barred from publication, served in the Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration, which is tasked with overseeing the day-to-day management of the West Bank. The officer, a major, was responsible for issuing permits for Palestinians to enter and work in Israel, a position of power that he repeatedly exploited in order to receive sexual favors from Palestinians.
The Israel Defense Forces’ Court of Appeals decided to rescind the gag order on the affair, which was considered to have potentially serious security ramifications due to its dramatic nature, following an appeal by the Ynet news site and years of legal battles. In a statement, the military said the gag order had been deemed necessary, in part, “to preserve national security.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/ending-censorship-idf-admits-officer-jailed-in-2017-raped-a-palestinian-woman/
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