by Fatima Bhutto, reposted from Zeteo, March 27, 2025
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.
[Editor’s note: Regarding alleged rapes of Israeli women on Oct. 7, see this.]
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.
Raped to Death
No one who has followed Israel’s history, literally founded on mass extermination, theft, and terror, will be surprised by any of this. Rights groups have documented how the Israeli military had systematically inflicted sexual and physical torture upon Palestinians for decades. In 2002, the rabbi who would eventually be promoted to the chief rabbi of the Israeli military, Col. Eyal Karim, declared that the rape of non-Jewish women was permitted “out of consideration for the difficulties faced by the soldiers and for overall success.” Last year, the UN Commission of Inquiry found that specific forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including public stripping and nudity intended to humiliate Palestinians, “constitute part of Israeli Security Forces’ operating procedures.”
I won’t belabor the point by going into the long and varied history of sexual sadism and degradation employed by Israel but let us not forget that Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, the head of orthopedics at Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital, was detained by the Israeli military and is believed to have been raped and beaten to death in Ofer Prison last April. “He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked from the lower part of his body. The prison guards threw him in the middle of the [prison] yard and left him there,” a human rights lawyer told Sky News, citing testimony from a Palestinian who saw al-Bursh just before he died in an Israeli prison. (Of course, Israel has denied any responsibility for the doctor’s death just as it has denied striking hospitals and committing the largest child massacre in its history just last week).
When several Israeli soldiers were arrested for allegedly gang-raping another Palestinian hostage at the infamous Sde Teiman torture site in July, Israelis were outraged. Outraged that their compatriots had been arrested, that is. A mob that included a minister of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Cabinet stormed the location where the soldiers were being held, demanding their release. A prominent Israeli TV host defended the gang rape (though he later retracted his comments) and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister in charge of the prison services, proudly declared that “everything published about the abominable conditions” thousands of Palestinians were kept in “was true.”
The Screams Now Have Words
But you’d be forgiven for thinking that most esteemed journalists of the West had never heard of any of this – or, in fact, have never learned how to do a basic Google search – by the way in which they have merrily ignored Israel’s policy of sexual violence against Palestinians. The only stories of rape they have bothered to extensively write about are, curiously enough, apparently ones that never happened.
Who can forget the New York Times’ “Screams Without Words,” a piece of unbridled Israeli propaganda largely about invented Hamas atrocities so fantastic that even a victim’s family members had to come out and refute its claims as impossible? The late Gal Abdush’s family – photographed for the piece – disputed that she had been raped on Oct. 7; key sources had a history of making fraudulent claims; other sources later changed their testimony; and one of the authors was a former Israeli Air Force intelligence officer who had liked a tweet demanding Gaza be made into a “slaughterhouse” and calling Palestinians “human animals.” According to the Intercept, even an episode of the Times’ ‘The Daily’ podcast was pulled after “furious internal debate” about the veracity of the original article’s reporting.
In January, Moran Gaz of the Israeli Prosecutor’s Office admitted to the Israeli outlet Yedioth Ahronoth that no one had come forward to her office with allegations against Hamas of rape or sexual assault. Gaz told the paper that her office had even gone so far as to seek out the cooperation of women’s rights organizations, and “they told us that no one had approached them.” This, in a society where Israeli women have come out to accuse a former defense minister of sexual assault and a former president of rape, both of whom were convicted.
So where is former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who made an entire film about debunked allegations of ‘mass rape’ against Israeli women by Hamas, now that Palestinian women are sharing the sexual abuse they have suffered from Israeli soldiers, both men and women? Where is actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who took time away from flogging cashmere sweatpants on her tedious website, to denounce Palestinians, falsely suggesting they use rape as a method of resistance? Where are former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his deranged Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who peddled debunked Hamas ‘mass rape’ claims? Where are the authors of “Screams Without Words” now that the screams actually have words? Has the Times commissioned a front-page piece on how Israeli women in uniform raped Palestinian women? Western hypocrisy is alive and well and thoroughly unrepentant. Women’s bodies are only sacred when they can be used as props to further Western imperial designs, and rape is only a crime and an outrage when it serves Western political interests.
Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent books include the novel The Runaways and her non-fiction reportage New Kings of the World. She recently hosted Reframe, a four-part series on the genocide in Gaza, on Al Jazeera.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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