The debunked 'Hamas mass rape' hoax was nothing but a means to a higher goal: The mass rape of Gaza and Gazans

There's no physical evidence, photo/video material, credible testimony or even a named victim of the alleged Palestinian induced sexual violence. When the tables are turned, it's exactly the opposite.

Aviva Klompas, a former speech writer for the Israeli mission to the UN, was the first notable Israeli to spread the story on the evening of October 7th that there were reports of "rapes of Israeli girls and their bodies being dragged through the streets". By the way, Klompas is the co-founder of Boundless Israel, an "unapologetic Zionist" organization that works to promote Israeli narratives on social media. Accusations of rape were also made by Benjamin Netanyahu on October 11th.

Then, on October 23rd, the IDF summoned about 200 journalists to a conference where they were to be shown photo and video materials of Hamas atrocities. Asked about evidence of the rapes, an Israeli army spokesman said they "have evidence" of the claims but "can't share it", declining to elaborate further. A Reuters journalist pointed out after the briefing that "the military personnel overseeing the identification process didn't present any forensic evidence in the form of pictures or medical records" of the rapes.

Later, the Times of Israel reported that Israel "lacks physical proof" that could be an integral part of legal proceedings: "There is significant evidence of systematic sexual abuse, but morgue officials have not designated individual cases as rape because of a lack of court-compliant physical proof ... This seemingly official decision not to provide clear evidence of rape to international media has fed persistent criticism, mostly from abroad, and many media outlets are now framing the October 7th rapes as a claim rather than a fully substantiated fact."

Questionable experts

Samantha Pearson, director of the Sexual Assault Center at the University of Alberta in Canada, signed a letter on October 25th, saying that the accusation that Palestinians are guilty of sexual violence remains "unconfirmed". The letter does not say that sexual violence did not happen, but it does conclude that there is not yet enough evidence to support those accusations. Hours after CNN aired a report on November 18th that included (alleged) testimonies of Israeli women being raped, Paerson was fired.

CNN's aforementioned report begins with an interview with Cochav Elkayam-Levy, identified as "a human rights expert who organized a citizens' committee to document the evidence". The woman in question is indeed an expert - just not in human rights. In her previous positions, which include a position in the Israeli government's Office of the Attorney General in the Department of International Law, she obtained legal vindication for Israeli officials who - no less - violated the human rights of Palestinians.

Namely, she is known for publishing "guidelines for policymakers, government officials and legal advisors in managing hunger strikes" in which she provided a detailed guide to "standardization through laws and regulations" for force-feeding; a brutal act of torture used to break political prisoners. In the same year, Israel legalized and regulated the law of "force feeding" to oppress Palestinian prisoners protesting their administrative detentions (Israel's right to detain Palestinians indefinitely without charge). Elkayam-Levy is also the founder and director of the Dvor Institute, which works as a close advisory body to the Israeli Prime Minister's National Security Council. The organization's advisory board includes the former director of the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and three former officials in the National Security Council.

"Countless Videos"

Now, during an interview for the Harvard Maimonides Society, the Israeli woman pointed to "a picture of a woman naked from the waist down ... photographed at the location of the Nova music festival" as proof of Hamas' rape. It is not clear whether the lawyer was deliberately trying to mislead the public by showing a picture originally published on the anonymous Hamas-Massacre website (promoted by the Israeli government), which has since been revealed to be an old photo of dead Kurdish women fighters (and therefore removed from the site).

Elkayam-Levy says she has reporters who ask her: "Did (the specific rape) really happen?" "What are we even talking about? This is about the most documented set of horrors humanity has known. There are innumerable videos that have already been released – just go into the Hamas Telegram groups. You are journalists, do your work. Don’t ask me what happened and how it happened. It is hard enough that I need to go through those groups myself to extract information from them", replies the woman who, among the "countless videos", came across one that had nothing to do with specific events.

After her, CNN featured an Israeli soldier - showing only his back - identified only as "G". He claims to be a paramedic for rescue unit 669, for the Israeli Air Force's special tactics. In his testimony, the man says that during the search of the houses of Kibbutz Be'eri, while the fighting was still going on, he opened the bedroom door and found the bodies of two girls between the ages of 13 and 15. Both of them, he says, were killed, and he noticed the remains of sperm on the bare back of one of them.

Non-existent victims

A list of the names of the girls killed in Be'eri reveals that not a single pair of Israeli teenage girls matching that description were found dead together. The closest possibility to what the paramedic describes are two sisters (Y; 13 years old and N; 16 years old). The two, however, were not found together. According to Israeli reports, the body of one was found with her dead mother at home, while the other sister and her father disappeared for several days. According to Israel's Ynet, "the family was hoping that the girl had been abducted to Gaza, but a few days after the attack they found her body".

Surprisingly, a very similar testimony was broadcast on October 25th on Republic, a right-wing conservative Indian TV channel, in which a soldier from the same unit appeared in an interview: This conversation was arranged by Eylon Levy, then the foreign media spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister's office. After the publication, Levy published the interview on X, claiming that it was a testimony from Be'eri, although the soldier in it referred to another settlement, Nahal Oz.

Also, according to an interview with Channel 13, the leader of the battle for Be'eri, Brigadier General Barak Hiram, counted 13 different military units that made up the fighting forces there. Unit 669 was not among them.

Selective amnesia

CNN then brings in two witnesses who talk about the condition of the dead bodies they saw. The first, for an unknown reason, appears under the pseudonym Sapir, although she shows her face and wears civilian clothes. The report identified her as a "volunteer" at the Shura military base morgue, where many bodies were brought in for identification and preparation for burial. The witness previously appeared in a written report (including a photograph of her in military uniform) - in which she was identified as a reserve corporal in the Israeli army - where she did not mention any allegations of sexual violence.

The second witness is Rami Shmuel, presented as one of the organizers of the Nova festival. Admittedly, he is the organizer of the UNITY festival, which was held the day before Nova, at the same location. The two festivals are not connected. CNN does not mention the fact that the person in question was not present at the festival location during the attack. According to Shmuel's Facebook post from the afternoon of October 7th, he was "safe" in a villa in the Netivot settlement.

Shmuel claims that the next day he (unofficially) joined the search for bodies and survivors in the area. What the Israeli wrote on social networks on the evening of October 8th did not reveal any traces of sexual violence: "I left the area an hour ago, and the scenes are very, very difficult ... A war zone in every sense of the word. Hundreds of abandoned cars littered bullets, fires are still burning in some open areas".

Tossing the breast

CNN continues: "On Tuesday, the police held a press briefing where the witness said...", after which the reporter moves to read the text from the screen. The quote suggests that the witness - a woman without any additional information about her - while hiding with another paramedic, saw the militants "bend someone down", which made her "understand that he was raping her, and then he passed her to someone else". "I saw that he cut off her breast and then threw it towards the road, and they started playing with it", says the anonymous Israeli woman.

The CNN report here hid many important facts that were previously detailed in the Israeli media. Namely, the woman in question did not talk to the journalists, but this recording was distributed by the Israeli police; she was reported to have escaped from a music festival, and what she describes was seen while hiding; she was accompanied by a paramedic who said he did not see what she mentioned; the last part of the testimony is omitted, which says: "I saw one of them carrying a naked girl on his shoulder, while the others held up severed heads, as a kind of demonstration of power." The latter claim was not shared by any of the Israeli officials and raises serious questions about the overall reliability of the witnesses.

The Israeli police then held a press briefing on November 13 that promised new evidence of sexual violence by Hamas (which is also the briefing CNN is referring to). However, as reported by the Israeli media, there was tension between journalists and police officers at that event, due to the lack of new information and clear evidence. The police chief refused to answer any questions, and David Katz, head of the criminal investigation unit, admitted: "We don't have any living victims who said 'we were raped'." The police press officer, Merit Ben Meir, engaged in a heated discussion with the journalists, telling them: "Based on the circumstances of the body, the rape took place and there is no room for questioning these events!"

Propaganda efforts

On November 19th, the Israeli press reported that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was intensifying its efforts to influence "global feminist organizations" and use the November 25th International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to promote its allegations of sexual assault. In the evening hours of the same day, an advertising campaign was published in which Israeli actresses and models repeated literally the same slogan with which a CNN journalist ends his report: "If it's rape of Israeli women, it doesn't count as rape."

Ten days later, Haaretz publishes an article entitled "The Scope of Hamas' Campaign of Rape Against Israeli Women Is Revealed, Testimony After Testimony". Admittedly, it states that "the commission has not taken testimony directly". Elkayam-Levy, already mentioned, complains here that she is asked questions like "was there semen" and "were there rape kit". "Am I the one who needs to provide the evidence for the terrorists’ deeds? What kind of travesty is it that they are imposing the burden of proof on me?", asks the head of the committee for documenting evidence.

She adds that she doesn't even "cooperate" when asked about the number of raped women. "There was a journalist here, a woman from the news network, who was driving me crazy. (She asked me): ‘Are we talking about tens? Hundreds? Thousands?’ I’m sorry. No. It would be irresponsible of me to cite a number”, the lawyer stresses. And Sarai Aharoni, who heads the documentation team at the Civilian Commission, also believes that any discussion of the figures is "sick". Additionally, Elkayam-Levy pointed out that "if there are survivors among the victims, it could be decades until they gather the courage to speak about it". Haaretz's text contains no names of victims, evidence of rape paraphernalia, reports of semen or even physical evidence of sexual acts.

The face of an angel

Just a day before the release of the aforementioned text, the UN commission investigating war crimes offered to focus on sexual violence by Hamas, saying it would file a request to participate in the collection of evidence. Commission chairwoman Navi Pillay said there was "no way they won't do it", bolstering her goodwill with the news that some are already willing to testify, which will then be handed over to prosecutors at the Hague Tribunal. However, Israel has refused to cooperate with the UN, which it claims is anti-Israel.

Then in December - parallel to the start of the ground invasion of Gaza - Israel's campaign to advertise rape intensified. "I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head", Saadon, a shift manager at the foundry, told the Sunday Times.

The young man said he witnessed the gruesome act after he pulled up the body of the murdered woman (who had also been shot in the head) over him and smeared himself with her blood to make it look like he was dead. Then, Saadon says, he saw two more Hamas members attacking another young woman who was resisting being stripped. "They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too", he recalled with a shudder, almost two months after the event.

Gut tearing

A BBC article soon followed, in which an anonymous man said: "Some women were raped before they were dead, some raped while injured, and some were already dead when the terrorists raped their lifeless bodies," his statement says. "I desperately wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do" According to this, necrophilia - which affects one percent of those who commit sexual murder - is apparently widespread in the Gaza Strip.

One of the volunteers who collected the bodies after the attack described the marks of torture and mutilation of the pregnant woman. He said they cut open her insides and then killed her. After that, they stabbed the fetus. Another gave a written statement stating that he saw the bodies of two women in Kibbutz Be'eri with their hands and feet tied to the bed. "One was sexually terrorised with a knife stuck in her vagina and all her internal organs removed", he wrote. "It brings me chills just to know the details that they knew about what to do to women: cut their organs, mutilate their genitals, rape", added Elkayam-Levy.

As for the evidence, unfortunately, “opportunities to carefully document the crime scenes, or take forensic evidence, were limited or missed", as the investigators feared that the Hamas were still around. "For the first five days, we still had terrorists on the ground in Israel and there were hundreds, hundreds of bodies everywhere. They were burned, they were without organs, they were butchered completely", said Netanyahu's Minister of Women's Empowerment May Golan, otherwise known as one of the leaders of the uprising against the black race in Tel Aviv. "I see shit, spit and psychopaths in front of my house. You can see it in their eyes, (these are) people who just want to kill me. But nobody believes us. We are racists. We are racists because we want to save our lives and our sanity. That's why I'm proud to be a racist!", were the words she used to lead the said gathering.

Pervasive anti-Semitism

The BBC cites as evidence of rape that one woman can be seen in the footage with handcuffs and cuts on her hands and a large blood stain on the lower part of her pants, as well as naked or half-naked hostages taken by the militants. Admittedly, if this were sufficient evidence for an act of sexual aggression, what else could we say about hundreds of Palestinian prisoners who are regularly stripped naked to the skin by Israeli soldiers? After all, the same BBC was accused by its journalists of unprofessional reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where terms like "massacre" and "atrocity" are reserved "only for Hamas", which they "present as the only instigator and perpetrator of violence in the region". "This is incorrect, but it is consistent with the entire BBC reporting", the employees of this media house stated in the letter.

In addition to the Western media, theories about Hamas sexual deviations were also readily propagated by Western politicians. Like, for example, Hillary Clinton, who said: "We must respond to weaponised sexual violence wherever it happens with absolute condemnation. There can be no justification and no excuses. Rape as a weapon of war is a crime against humanity. It is outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their eyes and their hearts to the victims of Hamas." Still, it's quite troubling when these words are uttered by a celebrated warmonger who played one of the main roles in destabilizing a good part of Africa, based on proven lies spread by her State Department, about Muammar al-Gaddafi handing out Viagra to his soldiers to carry out exactly - mass rape.

And to prove that the Hamas rapes are not lies, the UN's Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory sent letters to doctors and hospital staff who treated the victims on October 7th, asking for information for its independent investigation. For some reason, the Israeli Ministry of Health instructed members of the health system to refuse this cooperation, citing as the reason that this UN body is "anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic".

"Trust Israel"

After this, it took several more months before the claims of "Hamas mass rapes" began to disintegrate completely. So in April, one of the first nails in the coffin of these cynical fabrications arrived, when Haaretz wrote: "However, at Shura Base, to which most of the bodies were taken for purposes of identification, there were five forensic pathologists at work. In that capacity, they also examined bodies that arrived completely or partially naked in order to examine the possibility of rape. According to a source knowledgeable about the details, there were no signs on any of those bodies attesting to sexual relations having taken place or of mutilation of genitalia ... These teams did not document a single case of sexual assault or cases of genital mutilation."

Two months later, the British Times published a detailed report, admitting that there was simply no evidence for these stories. "To this date, police have not interviewed a single survivor … On January 4, the police put out a fresh appeal for witnesses, saying they had succeeded in interviewing just three and had been unable to match their accounts with the bodies collected from the massacre site", the article reads. The Times also quotes Sarai Aharoni, an academic at Ben-Gurion University who is helping compile a historical archive of the event, as saying that those associated with Netanyahu's party "have used the feminist agenda in a very opportunistic way for a very specific political narrative" with little regard for the actual victims. "The politicisation of rape by the Israeli government was part of the political agenda of this government”, she warns, pointing out that campaigns like "Trust Israel's Women" had a different goal than what was presented. "They meant 'trust Israel'", says Aharoni.

The text also referred to how "the women who did the forensic evaluations were not qualified to do so”, while "others repeated the stories after they were proven to be false". One of them was - Elkayam-Levy. "I realised that I cannot accept the way she’s handling things — talking at some points irresponsibly without checking the credibility of information, repeating questionable accounts", recalled professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, an expert on international women's rights who organized legal aid on the case.

Screams without words

The Times also noted that Israeli authorities were unable to provide the evidence that political leaders insisted existed. "In all the Hamas video footage Patten’s team had watched and all the photographs they had seen, there were no depictions of rape. We hired a leading Israeli dark-web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage deleted from public sources. None could be found", they said from the London media house.

Then in July, the Middle East Monitor issued a detailed investigative piece, meticulously going over every aspect of alleged industrial-level sexual abuse, thoroughly debunking it. In one part, the author looks at two people who claimed to have seen gang rape: the already mentioned Sapir and Raz Cohen, whose stories were cited by almost every one of the 13 media studies and civil society reports as evidence of rape. By the way, Cohen is a survivor of the electronic music festival Nova, but also a veteran of the Israeli special forces. Since his first interview on October 9th, the Israeli has changed his testimony several times.

Indeed, Cohen told the New York Times in December that he personally witnessed a white van full of Hamas militants pull up a mile from the Nova music festival, gather around a woman and gang-rape her: "I saw men standing in a half-circle around her. One penetrates her ... She screams, I still remember her voice, she screams without words." He said that they then butchered the woman with knives. However, when he testified about the attack on the music festival on October 9th, he did not mention any act of sexual assault by Hamas militants.

Eyes wide shut

But just a day later, Cohen began introducing vague suggestions of sexual assault into his testimony, without indicating that he had witnessed such acts. "The terrorists captured the women and hurt them in every possible way, and when they were done with them, they started slaughtering them in front of their friends", Cohen told an Israeli publication. Cohen was also interviewed by Canada's CBC on October 10th, but was not quoted as having witnessed the rape.

That same day, Cohen offered vivid new details to PBS, claiming that Hamas not only slaughtered women after raping them on October 7th, but also engaged in necrophilia: "Terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, killed them with knives, or the opposite, killed them and after that raped them." The testimony he gave to ABC on October 11th differed slightly and remained vague: "We see many people and girls from there screaming and being killed with knives. And the girls, the terrorists are raping them", he stated curtly and without apparent emotion. Up to that point, no Israeli media had reported that any rape had taken place on October 7.

Nevertheless, the man who first interviewed Cohen, Ariel Oseran, recounted in an interview how the "witness" "told him that he decided not to look, but he could hear them constantly laughing". He also noted Cohen's insistence that "these were ordinary Gazans" who were not carrying weapons, not Hamas militants. This, in fact, is in contrast to the "Screams Without Words" investigation by the NY Times, in which he serves as a key witness. In that article, Cohen - a man who wasn't looking - said he "then saw five men wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging the woman on the ground".

The raped family

The same NY Times article was also the first to explicitly identify one of the victims of alleged rape by Palestinian militants. It was the late Gal Abdush, who was introduced as a "woman in a black dress", a member of a working-class Jewish family. However, almost immediately after the announcement, something (not at all) startling happened. Namely, her family publicly denied these claims.

Her mother said the family was unaware of the rape allegations until they spoke to the Times, while her husband's brother in an interview categorically denied that Gal had been sexually assaulted, saying his brother - also killed in the attack - had witnessed her death and that he never mentioned the rape. Despite this, the NY Times claimed that Israeli police used videos of Gala's body as evidence of the rape, showing them to international governments and the media. But the video itself never went viral, as the newspaper claimed, nor was it ever widely reported in the Israeli media.

The Abdush family expressed deep dissatisfaction with the way journalists contacted and interviewed them, claiming they were misled. According to Gala's sister Tala, the journalists said they wanted to write a story about their family's tragedy, without mentioning sexual violence as a key element. "At 6:51, Gal sent us a message on WhatsApp saying ‘we are at the border, and you can’t imagine sounds of explosions around us.’ At 7 o’clock, my brother-in-law called his brother and said they shot Gal and she’s dying. It doesn’t make any sense that in four minutes, they raped her, slaughtered her, and burned her?", the shaken sister pointed out, clearly pointing out that the family would never have agreed to the interview if they had known that the topic would be rape.

No evidence

But the propaganda did not stop there. Namely, in August, an alleged letter from an Israeli man who, after surviving the attack at the Supernova festival, decided to kill himself due to trauma that included witnessing a rape, began to spread on the Internet. The letter was initially circulated by Hen Mazzig, an employee of the Israeli propaganda organization Tel Aviv Institute, and Aviva Klompas, a former spokeswoman for the Israeli government. The story was soon debunked by the Israeli media, who tried to get in touch with the family of the alleged suicide bomber, only to discover that it was all a fabrication. Adam Shafir, producer of the "Hatzinor" program on Israel's Channel 13, announced that the letter was a "complete fake", and Mazzig subsequently issued an apology.

In the meantime, the reactions of international bodies, responsible for sexual violence as a tool of war, began to arrive. Thus, in May, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, in the report of the advisory board of international law experts, stated that no concrete evidence was found of such attacks on October 7th, on which any accusations could be based. "My office continues to investigate reports of sexual violence committed on October 7th", it said, referring to the alleged events of that date. Humas Right Watch soon announced the same, namely that they failed to collect “verifiable information through interviews with survivors or victims of rape during the October 7th attack".

The next month saw the dawn of what everyone was waiting for - the final verdict of the UN delegation on this matter. This statement reads: "The Commission has reviewed testimonies obtained by journalists and the Israeli police concerning rape but has not been able to independently verify such allegations, due to a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities. The Commission was unable to review the unedited version of such testimonies. For the same reasons, the Commission was also unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation. Additionally, the Commission found some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate or contradictory with other evidence or statements and discounted these from its assessment." It is also stated that the commission "did not find credible evidence, however, that militants received orders to commit sexual violence and so it was unable to make conclusions on this issue."

Reverse roles

Admittedly, the same report reveals something else, namely sexual assaults and rapes by Israeli troops. It also reveals that "an unknown number of Palestinian women and children, including girls, have been reported missing following contact with the Israeli army in Gaza". "The Commission documented many incidents in which ISF systematically targeted and subjected Palestinians to SGBV online and in person since October 7, including through forced public nudity, forced public stripping, sexualized torture and abuse, and sexual humiliation and harassment. These incidents took place during ground operations in conjunction with evacuations and arrests. Based on testimonies and verified video footage and photographs, the Commission finds that sexual violence has been perpetrated throughout the OPT during evacuation processes, prior to or during arrest, at civilian homes and at a shelter for women and girls. Sexual acts were carried out by force, including under threats, intimidation and other forms of duress, in inherently coercive circumstances due to the armed conflict and the presence of armed Israeli soldiers", the text reads.

It also adds that the "frequency, prevalence and severity" of sexual abuses indicate that they are "part of the operational procedures of the IDF". "Palestinian men and boys experienced specific persecutory acts intended to punish them in retaliation for the crimes committed on 7 October. The way in which these acts were committed, including their filming and photographing, in conjunction with similar cases documented in several locations, leads the Commission to conclude that forced public stripping and nudity and other related types of abuse were either ordered or condoned by Israeli authorities.”

It also states that sexual violence "constitutes a major element in the ill-treatment of Palestinians, intended to humiliate the community at large". "This violence is intrinsically linked to the wider context of inequality and prolonged occupation, which have provided the conditions and the rationale for gender-based crimes, to further accentuate the subordination of the occupied people. The Commission notes that these crimes must be addressed by tackling their root cause; through dismantling the historically oppressive structures and institutionalized system of discrimination against Palestinians, which are at the core of the occupation", the UN notes.

Sexual cannibalism

It has also been documented how Israeli soldiers strip minor Palestinian girls down to their underwear and sexually harass them, groping and touching them, while male relatives are forced to watch. Those who refuse are beaten, abused, imprisoned for days and threatened with having their children shot. Boys and men are disproportionately sexually abused by the IDF in Gaza, with the United Nations citing hundreds and hundreds of such cases. For example, one female soldier made boys dance half-naked and filmed them laughing, while soldiers deliberately destroyed and wrote highly (sexually) offensive graffiti in the offices of women's rights organizations in Gaza and in the homes they looted.

Unfortunately, the main sponsor of the IDF's adventures, Washington, is well aware of all these events. Namely, Israeli Brigadier General Amir Avivi stated that an official of the US State Department told him that he knows that Israeli forces systematically sexually abuse Palestinian women.

However, Israelis do not only commit sexual violence against Palestinians, but also against - Israelis. This is precisely what many Israeli media are reporting on, stating that refugees from kibbutzim around Gaza, as well as from border settlements near Lebanon, report that they were raped in hotels in Tel Aviv, where they stayed after October 7th. In these cases, the most common victims are children.

Dogs and carrots

Finally, in July, this public secret became just that - public. Especially after the Israeli newspaper +972 reported at the end of June six new cases in which IDF soldiers raped Palestinian civilians in the Sde Teiman prison camp, while forcing others to watch. Also, this was the sixth such report this year, which makes such cases systematic and widespread. Earlier, the NY Times wrote that Israel was raping abducted Gazans in the same camp, with one victim dying after being penetrated by an electrocuted rod in the anus. The article also stated how an IDF officer ordered the rape of a senior nurse from Gaza, while a UN worker was forced to sit on a "hot metal rod".

Back in April, Haaretz published stories on multiple rapes: "They were led to the kitchen, where they were stripped and forced to lie one on top of the other, a pile of 10 naked prisoners. Abu Halil was the last. There, they were beaten with clubs and spat on. A guard then started to stuff carrots into the anus of Abu Halil and other prisoners." In March, a Canadian doctor was informed of the case of a Gazan woman who was "raped by the IDF for two days until she lost the ability to speak". Another was "undressed by Israeli soldiers in front of her husband and brother", and when they protested, the soldiers liquidated them.

In February, UN experts reported on at least two cases in which Israeli soldiers abducted women from Gaza and raped them in custody, while as recently as last December freed Palestinian prisoners testified that jailers subjected them to brutal treatment, including sexual abuse and rape. But the most painful story is definitely the one from June, when a survivor from Sde Teiman told how Israeli soldiers forced dogs to sexually attack and rape kidnapped Palestinians.

From rape to the stars

And then in August, a video was released showing Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian hostage in Sde Teiman, shielding their actions from the camera. They did this in front of all the other hostages, so that they could hear the moans and suffering of the victim.

After this became public, in the Israeli Channel 12 political show on this topic, one of the guests said that he "doesn’t care what they do to such a guy". "The only thing that is problematic for me is that it is not an established state policy, to abuse prisoners. Because, first of all, they deserve it and it is a great revenge that we should inflict on them. Also, it could serve as a shield against their criminality , he suggested. And how did he justify this? With Hamas mass rapes on October 7th.

And when the police came to arrest the perpetrators of these crimes, they were met by an angry mob, ready to defend them. To this day, no charges have been brought, while the main rapist has even become a celebrated media star and a frequent guest on television shows.

Rabbi’s doctrine

But if you thought that defenders of rapists in Israel were a minority - you were 65 percent wrong. Namely, there are exactly that many Israeli Jews who support the soldiers who forcefully pushed objects into the body openings of Palestinians abducted from Gaza, according to a survey by the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies.

Admittedly, there is a logical explanation for this fascination of Israeli society with mass rapes. In particular, there really is someone in that country who propagates this kind of practice. His name is Eyal Karim and he is Israel's chief military rabbi. And he became this despite the fact that before his appointment a scandal broke out over his statements in which he encourages soldiers to rape women during the war. The controversial Karim claims that as part of maintaining military fitness and morale during combat, it is permissible to "breach" the walls of modesty and "satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will, out of consideration for the difficulties faced by the soldiers and for overall success".

After some national voices rebelled against this, 150 Zionist rabbis came to the colleague's defense, signing a statement stating that "the attempt to disqualify Karim's appointment because of his legitimate Torah positions is an attempt that will seriously harm the entire Torah world in the State of Israel and the Israeli defense forces". Karim is now a brigadier general and gives spiritual guidance to Israeli soldiers who are continuing to mass-rape Gaza.