An undated photo from winter 2023 provided by Breaking The Silence, a whistleblower group of former Israeli soldiers, shows blindfolded Palestinian prisoners captured in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces and held at a detention facility on the Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel.
Photo: Breaking The Silence via AP
Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.
The months after
the October 7, 2023, attacks saw a wave of
questionable
mainstream
news stories
about alleged sexual assault in Hamas’s attacks that day on Israel.
It would be years before the American press began to deal with sex crimes against Palestinians imprisoned by Israel as part of its brutal occupation.
It’s a reckoning that is long overdue.
Sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians in detention is both a systematic and a decades-old practice — a well understood dynamic that is being put in the spotlight this week in a new report from the
Palestinian Feminist Collective
, a group of Palestinian and Arab feminist researchers and organizers.
The extensive 188-page report, parts of which were shared with The Intercept in advance of publication, situates recent,
high-profile
news
stories
detailing the rape and sexual assault of Palestinians in Israeli detention as part of “a wider system of sexualized and gendered violence spanning detention, warfare, surveillance, reproductive destruction, family separation, domicide, and the desecration of Palestinian bodies” over decades.
The report, “
A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence Against Palestinians
,” brings together witness and survivor testimonies; news coverage; academic research; United Nations reports; and findings from human rights groups, like the Gaza-based
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
, Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, and Israel-based
B’Tselem
; along with declassified Israeli archival material. (The Israeli
… [more]
