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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.

The findings of the report, which was conducted by the UN Commission
of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, drew not only from
survivor accounts but also from Israeli soldiers’ own social media
posts. Perpetrators proudly documented their “heroic” acts of
masculine vengeance — rummaging through Palestinians women’s drawers,
posing in their underwear, and scrawling misogynistic graffiti inside
occupied homes in Gaza. Though much of this content was later scrubbed
from social platforms, it remains archived in the UN report for
posterity.

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https://www.972mag.com/systematic-sexual-violence-against-palestinians/