On October 13, 2023, within a mere few days of Israel’s latest war on Gaza, Holocaust scholar Raz Segal described Israel’s assault as a “textbook case” of genocide.1Raz Segal, “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” Jewish Currents, October 13, 2023. Shortly thereafter, more than eight hundred scholars of genocide issued a statement against this crime against humanity, noting that Israel’s lengthy blockage of the Gaza Strip had been described as “slow motion genocide,” which was now accelerating.2Jake Johnson, “800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May be Perpetrating ‘Crime of Genocide’ in Gaza,” Common Dreams, October 18, 2023. Israel has made it clear it wants to depopulate the Gaza Strip, and is actively attempting to secure relocation of the residents, 80 percent of whom are refugees from other parts of Palestine.
On December 29, 2023, South Africa lodged a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocidal acts. Within weeks, on January 26, 2024, the ICJ ruled that Israel must take all necessary measures to ensure that acts “deemed genocidal” do not take place in the Gaza Strip.3Fatima al-Kassab, “A Top UN Court Says Gaza Genocide Is ‘Plausible,’ but Does Not Order Ceasefire,” NPR, January 26, 2024. An ICJ ruling on whether Israel’s war on Gaza effectively constitutes genocide is at least a month away (at the time of writing), yet with the staggering number of Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023, only the vilest of Zionists, looking for a loophole in the legal definition of that word, would argue it is not “genocide.”
According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified by 153 states, “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”4“Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” United Nations.
Of the five possible acts of genocide listed in the Genocide Convention, South Africa’s ICJ case documents Israel’s systematic perpetration of the first four in Gaza. South Africa also stated that “acts of genocide inevitably form part of a continuum—as Raphael Lemkin who coined the term ‘genocide’ himself recognized.” 5South Africa, “Application Instituting Proceedings,” International Court of Justice, document no. 192-20231228-APP-01-00-EN.
The continuum, South Africa explains, includes Israel’s “75-year-long apartheid, its 56-year-long belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza.”6Ibid. I am particularly interested in looking at the “continuum” of the fourth act of genocide, namely “imposing measures intended to prevent (Palestinian) births.” This is, of course, a form of gender violence and a denial of reproductive justice and needs to be exposed as such.
This denunciation is all the more critically important as Zionists have sensationalized the allegations of gender violence perpetrated by Hamas militants against Israeli women, while colonial feminists, who have been silent for decades about Israel’s gendered violence against the Palestinian people, are vocal again. In this short essay, then, I will look at how Israel’s denial of reproductive justice for, as well as its long record of engaging in gender violence against, the Palestinian people, are an important if often overlooked aspect of its genocidal practices.
Reproductive Genocide
An overview of the “continuum” of genocide through gender violence should start before the founding of the Israeli state, when Zionist fighters engaged in countless rapes of Palestinian women at the onset of al Nakba. Ilan Pappé’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, reports on some of these rapes, which a technical glitch on Israel’s official archives website shows were known to Zionists and “forgiven” by Israeli politicians.7 Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007). “I can forgive instances of rape, but will not forgive other acts,” one member of Israel’s provisional government is recorded as saying about the sexual atrocities that occurred in 1947 and 1948.8Staff, “Israeli Minister Says, ‘He Can Forgive Instances of Rape,’ 1948 Documents Reveal,” Middle East Eye, January 6, 2022.
Our historic overview also takes us back to 1967, when Israel imposed extreme limitations on the practice of midwifery amongst Palestinians living under occupation, thus leading to a sharp decline in this lifesaving, life-giving practice.9See, for example, Mindy Levy et al., “Israeli and Palestinian Midwives,” in Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier: Speaking Truth to Power, Betty-Anne Daviss and Robbie Davis-Floyd, eds. (London: Routledge, 2020). As a result of the gradual but intended dwindling of this practice, Palestinian women have had to rely solely on hospitals for prenatal care and birthing. Access to hospitals, however, is severely restricted by the more than five hundred checkpoints and roadblocks Israel has erected across the West Bank.
An estimated 10 percent of pregnant women are detained and delayed at Israeli-staffed checkpoints within the West Bank, and from 2000 to 2005, thirty-six newborn infants had died at checkpoints.
These restrictions have forced Palestinian women to give birth at checkpoints under inhumane circumstances. An estimated 10 percent of pregnant women are detained and delayed at Israeli-staffed checkpoints within the West Bank, and one study shows that from 2000 to 2005, thirty-six newborn infants had died at checkpoints.
In early 2023, Israel was celebrating the declining Palestinian birthrate, and the rising Jewish Israeli one. “Far from facing a ‘demographic time bomb’ in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration,” writes Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli ambassador to the US.10Yoram Ettinger, “2023 Update: No Arab Demographic Time Bomb,” Jewish News Syndicate, March 19, 2023. “Judea and Samaria” is how Zionists refer to the West Bank.
Israeli gender violence against Palestinians is also rampant in prisons, where women and girls are regularly sexually harassed, frequently strip-searched and interrogated by male soldiers, threatened with rape, and actually raped.11Tamam Mohsin, “How Colonizers Weaponize Rape: Reflections from the Palestinian Case,” Mondoweiss, August 8, 2022. As Khitam Saafin, an organizer who spent three months in administrative detention, puts it: “It’s not something that’s done by an individual soldier who decided to humiliate or mistreat [the prisoners], it’s part of the process, part of the policy, in order to affect the entire society and put it under pressure.”12Dylann N., “Sexual Harassment and Violence against Palestinian Women in Israeli Prisons,” The Jerusalem Fund, August 3, 2018.
A female soldier is supposed to be present during interrogation, but that is not always the case. Besides, female Israeli soldiers are no less violent than their male counterparts, and often feel they have to gain the “respect” of their male counterparts by being overtly violent. The Jerusalem Fund notes that “sexual harassment and violence against Palestinian women is tactically used as institutionalized maltreatment by the Israeli regime.”13Ibid. Undoubtedly, women face the brunt of this systematic treatment, but Palestinian men are “similarly humiliated in a sexualized way in efforts to break up and traumatize families.”14Ibid.
The situation is more dire in the Gaza Strip, where the sixteen-year-old siege enforced by Israel and Egypt has resulted in unlivable conditions for the 2.3 million Palestinians in the region, even before the latest escalation. Women’s roles as caregivers, cooking for and nursing their families, have become significantly more challenging since the siege, with chronic food shortages and a deepening water crisis.
The many wars Israel has launched against Gaza have resulted in the gradual destruction of medical facilities, with no repairs possible. The healthcare system, now completely destroyed, was already frail. As activist Alice Rothchild, a retired obstetrician, explains, before Israel’s latest war on Gaza, infant mortality in the Strip was about seven times higher than in Israel.
Rothchild adds that for mothers, “hemorrhage, infection, thromboembolic disease, pregnancy-induced hypertension, obstructed labor and unsafe pregnancy terminations have been the leading causes of maternal mortality. Those complications are largely preventable or manageable in the developed world.” But of course, Israel has been very deliberate in its underdevelopment of the Gaza Strip and has, since October 7, systematically bombed and raided every hospital in Gaza, attempting to wipe out an already devastated health sector.
As of this writing, Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip has entered its fourth month. The war crimes are of such magnitude—more than twenty-nine thousand confirmed dead, with thousands still uncounted, as they are still buried under the rubble—that specific life stories and life histories of individuals can get similarly lost in the rubble. But we cannot be desensitized to Palestinian deaths.
What these numbers mean is that Israel is killing a Palestinian every six minutes, or a Palestinian child every ten minutes. Nor should the injuries be minimized: ten Palestinian children are losing one or both legs every day since the latest escalation, with most amputations being done without anesthesia. Others are losing arms, their vision, hearing, even some organs, with lifelong consequences.
The number of children killed, ‘at least 9,600’ by January 14, was larger than the entire student population of the school district we lived in.
At a talk she was giving, a local activist in my town conveyed the scale of the losses by pointing out that the number of children killed, “at least 9,600” by January 14, was larger than the entire student population of the school district we lived in. “At least 9,600” means that more children should be presumed dead, their small bodies, bones, hopes, breaths crushed under the cement, stones, and rebar that once offered them shelter.
All these children, all killed by Israel. Of the survivors, 25 percent have been orphaned, tens of thousands maimed, and every single one is traumatized, cold, thirsty, and hungry. There is a manufactured famine in the Gaza Strip, diseases are rampant, and relief convoys bringing in food and medicine are still being blocked and delayed by Israel.
This genocide is not about Hamas’s October 7 attack, even if that attack included sexual atrocities. Israel has aspired to be a country free of Palestinians since before its foundation in 1948. Hamas, it bears noting and repeating, did not form until 1987. Additionally, Israel has demonstrated again and again that it can successfully carry out targeted assassinations.
If its goal were to eliminate Hamas leader- ship, it could have achieved that. Instead, it wants the complete erasure of the Palestinian people. Palestinian life itself is a threat to Israel, yet the measures it has taken for decades to control the Palestinian birthrates have failed to satisfy its goal. Today, the murder of entire families is not collateral damage, it is Israel’s intention, an accelerated genocide.
And still, when Palestinian feminists and our allies denounce these Israeli atrocities—the orchestrated, state-sanctioned, longstanding Israeli gender violence against our people—colonial feminists accuse us of antisemitism because we are not denouncing the alleged Hamas rapes of Israeli women that supposedly occurred during the October 7 attacks.
On Believing
From pinkwashing to purplewashing, Israel has a long record of exploiting gender issues for political purposes. As its war crimes are now broadcast around the world, it has an ever greater need to ramp up its propaganda. And as with pinkwashing, Israel’s exploitation of gendered violence does not stem from a genuine concern for vulnerable communities, but rather, uses the alleged crimes to justify its own atrocities.
In this light, the lack of evidence to support the many reports of “systematic gang rapes” that allegedly took place during Hamas’s attack on the rave and two nearby kibbutzim can be seen as pure propaganda, the denunciation of one atrocity to justify genocide.15See, for example, Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella, “Screams without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7,” The New York Times, December 28, 2023. The article, which claims to be a thorough investigation, relies exclusively on secondhand sources, many of whom have been discredited, as the Israeli government itself stated that some of what they reported, such as the beheading of babies, simply did not take place. It is indeed jarring that no survivor has come forward to corroborate any of the alleged crimes, not even with their identity concealed for privacy, as we continue to read secondhand reports about them, mostly from discredited witnesses.
Meanwhile, we have Israeli women who are recounting their ordeal in captivity. Speaking to Israel’s Channel 13 television station after being freed in a hostage exchange between Hamas and Israel, a young Israeli woman, Mia Schem, said she had feared being raped while in captivity.16Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, “Israeli Hostage Mia Schem Reveals Only Reason Hamas Captor Didn’t Rape Her During 54 Hellish Days,” The New York Post, January 1, 2024.
Palestinian feminists and our allies have been accused of not believing Israeli women. But I absolutely do believe Mia Schem. We live in a global rape culture. That fear is all the more justified when a woman is completely defenseless, in hostile circumstances. But the twenty-one-year-old Schem says she was not raped by her captors.
In her interview with Israeli television, she says it is because the captor’s wife was there. “His wife was outside the room with the children. That was the only reason he didn’t rape me,” Schem claims.17Ibid. She goes further, to state that this captor also confided in her that he did not love his wife.
The narrative is problematic, yet useful, in that it comes from a released hostage. Yes, the young Schem must have been traumatized. She had been kidnapped while at a rave, injured, and held hostage for fifty-four days while Israel was bombing Gaza. But how does she know the captor wanted to rape her and held back because of his wife, even though he “didn’t love” that wife?
And what’s love got to do with rape? Schem’s speculation as to why she was not raped is her theory, ironically giving the unloved wife great powers over her husband. But that speculation doesn’t offer any evidence that she would have been raped had the wife not been present.
Schem also admits that she would have enjoyed a hug from this woman: “You feel like you want a hug, you know, woman to woman, to break down a bit. That’s all you had there. But she was so mean, she had such mean eyes—a bad woman.”18Ibid.
What sisterhood is Schem invoking between her and the Palestinian wife? Did she feel that way when she was staffing a checkpoint, preventing women from accessing healthcare? Did she want “a hug, you know, woman to woman” when that Palestinian woman was mourning a child’s murder, or grieving a husband’s administrative detention, his indefinite imprisonment for the crime of being Palestinian?
Schem seems utterly incapable of recognizing Palestinian suffering, as she calls all the inhabitants of Gaza terrorists. “It was important to me to relay the truth about the nature of the people who live in Gaza, who they truly are and what I experienced there,” she told the press. “It is important to you that the world understands, what? That I went through a holocaust. Everyone over there is a terrorist.”19Ibid. (emphasis added) Still, Schem does not claim she was raped, only that she feared being raped.
Another freed hostage who spoke to the press, Yarden Roman-Gat, also states that she feared being raped but was not. Speaking on 60 Minutes, Roman-Gat was visiting her in-laws at Kibbutz Re’im when the Hamas fighters attacked.20See “Israeli hostage Yarden Roman-Gat shares details of her captivity in Gaza,” 60 Minutes, December 17, 2023. She took off running in her pajamas, and when she could not run any longer, she was captured by the fighters.
She recounts that, as they dragged her away, her pajama pants were coming down. “I thought, if they didn’t have that intention, now they might. And I’m half naked,” she told the reporter.21Ibid. But they didn’t rape her. Later, in captivity, they gave her a hijab, which she felt protected her. I believe Yarden Roman-Gat.
A third freed hostage who spoke to the press, Doron Katz Asher, says she endured “psychological warfare” during her fifty-day captivity.22Christian Edwards and Bianna Golodryga, “Freed Israeli Hostage Says She Endured ‘Psychological Warfare’ During 50 Days of Hamas Captivity,” CNN, January 4, 2024. Asher was kidnapped along with her two daughters, aged five and two. “They stitched my wounds without anesthetic, on the couch while my girls were next to me,” she told a journalist upon her release, clearly oblivious to the fact that she should be grateful she had received any treatment at all.23Ibid.
To put Asher’s comment in perspective, as a result of Israel’s utter destruction of Gaza’s medical facilities, Palestinian women are giving birth through caesarian section, without anesthetic. There are currently around fifty thousand pregnant women in the Gaza Strip, with 180 to two hundred giving birth every day since Israel’s assault began, following the sixteen-year siege.
Asher then comments: “I can’t comprehend what has happened to my family, and I can’t comprehend the inhumanity of them. People who murder people in their beds. Who does that? That’s not human.”24Ibid. Is it indeed possible that Asher does not realize that Israel murders entire families, in their beds, but also in the streets, after rendering them homeless, and that it has been murdering entire families since its foundation, indeed, since before its foundation?
Still, I believe Doron Katz Asher. Who says she endured “psychological warfare” but not physical or sexual assault. Another freed hostage, Sharon Alony Cunio, also recounted the “horrors” she had endured while in captivity with her twin daughters in the Gaza Strip, even as we are told that, upon their release, they were “physically safe, and healthy.”25Julia Frankel, “A Freed Israeli Hostage Relives Horrors of Captivity and Fears for her Husband, Still Held in Gaza,” AP News, January 16, 2024.
Cunio explained that one of the twin girls was separated from the rest of the family, who feared she was dead, only to be surprised when, three days later, “This guy just handed me Emma, like she’s a box or something. And I was shocked,” Cunio said, adding that she “couldn’t believe that they brought her back to us.”26Ibid.
I believe it, and I believe Cunio, even though, like many of the reports by freed hostages, Cunio’s reeks of racism, the inherent assumption that Palestinians are incapable of acting in humane ways. Yet Cunio, like the other Israeli women who were defenseless in the presence of Hamas militants, does not suggest she was sexually assaulted.
As a feminist, I am deeply aware of how difficult it can be for a survivor to speak of the sexual assault she has endured, and under no circumstances would I categorically assert that none happened. Sadly, history has demonstrated again and again that gender violence increases at times of conflict, war, militarized aggression. I am also aware that all the alleged rapes are said to have happened during the October 7 attacks, not since then, in Hamas captivity.
Still, the accusations abound, every single one of them coming from someone who “saw someone,” none from survivors, and there seems to be no evidence to corroborate any of the alleged crimes. Instead, every attempt at correlating known victims of the attack with descriptions of the alleged crimes has failed to confirm the veracity of witness reports.
A thorough investigation by the French newspaper Libération also fails to find any evidence whatsoever of the alleged rapes, or the equally sensationalized claims of beheadings of Israeli babies in the kibbutzim.27Cédric Mathiot, Florian Gouthière, and Jacques Pezet “Israël, 7 octobre: un massacre et des mystifications,” Libération, December 11, 2023. The investigation gives a detailed, itemized list of the Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7, concluding that “ten children were killed in the Be’eri massacre, most of them teenagers.”
Not forty babies, as Yossi Landau, a representative for the first responder group ZAKA told the media. Libération goes on to say there was not a total of forty babies in that kibbutz in October 2023. Nor, according to neighbors of “unit 426” in the apartment complex where Landau states he saw a pregnant woman whose fetus had been pulled out of her, was there any pregnant woman living there.
The video that purports to show this atrocity was later found to have been produced by a Mexican cartel in 2018. Lest anyone thinks that Libération favors Hamas—they refer to them as terrorists. Yet Landau is now the lead spokesperson on the alleged rapes, despite having been discredited about the beheadings he claims to have witnessed, which the Israeli government itself said did not happen.
Weaponizing Rape Allegations
Against the backdrop of Israel’s lengthy record of gender violence against the Palestinian people, the global outcry about the unsubstantiated claims of systematic mass rape of Israeli women by Hamas militants sounds worse than hollow. Indeed, these claims are weaponized accusations, formulated not out of feminist concern, but to further the wholescale massacre of Palestinians, whose very existence is viewed as a “demographic threat” to Israel.
The global outcry about the unsubstantiated claims of systematic mass rape of Israeli women by Hamas militants are weaponized accusations, formulated to further the wholescale massacre of Palestinians.
This understanding is articulated in the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s “Shut Down Colonial Feminism” statement issued on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The statement explains that:
in Palestine, the Zionist settler-colonial project is driven by a demographic anxiety that
constructs Palestinian women’s bodies, sexualities, and reproductive capacities as security threats. Palestinian mothers are coded as ‘problems’ and are systematically denied reproductive justice and security.28“Shut Down Colonial Feminism on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women,” Palestinian Feminist Collective, n.d.
Yet Israel apologists are ever eager to point the finger at Hamas and away from the greater context of violence that Israel imposes on the Palestinian people. The “what about Hamas?” derailment tactic had one of its more egregious manifestations when Zionist zealot Alan Dershowitz railed against the “radical feminists” who called for the unsealing of the Jeffery Epstein sex trafficking documents, which suggest Dershowitz may have had repeated sexual contact with a minor himself, saying “Where are all those radical feminists when it comes to the Hamas rapes of young, Jewish girls?” and sneering that, for these “radical feminists,” it’s “Me Too, except if you’re a Jew.”29Evy Kwong, “Alan Dershowitz Responds to Epstein Docs,” Vice, January 4, 2024.
Other high profile Zionists who have denounced the alleged rapes include Hillary Clinton who, in a video message to an Israeli-led assembly at the United Nations, said “It is outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their eyes and their hearts to the victims of Hamas.”30Zachary Leeman, “Hillary Clinton Calls Out Those ‘Closing Their Eyes’ to Hamas Rape Victims: ‘Crime Against Humanity,’” MSN, December 4, 2023. Clinton, of course, has always closed her own eyes and hearts to the victims of Israel, and has a long record of the crassest racism against Palestinians, whom she views as terrorists.
In an earlier article in The Forward, she had written about being appalled that the streets of Jerusalem were “filled with terrorism and fear,” and that “daily stabbings and shootings of innocent [Israeli] civilians—teenagers, parents and senior citizens,” were now common.31Hillary Clinton, “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond with Israel—And Benjamin Netanyahu,” Forward, November 5, 2015. According to Clinton, Israelis apparently “have to look over their shoulders during everyday tasks, like carrying groceries and waiting for the bus.” She did not have a word of condemnation for Israel’s egregious violation of international law and the human rights of the Palestinian people.
Similarly, Sheryl Sandberg addressed an assembly at the UN headquarters in New York in which she slammed the organization for its silence on the alleged rapes. Sandberg, a co-organizer, with Clinton, of the assembly at the UN, also wrote a column in which she argued that the silence on the alleged rapes “is deafening,” and urged her readers to “denounce these rapes in every conversation, at every rally, and on signs held on every street corner.”32Sheryl Sandberg, “Something We Can All Agree On,” CNN, November 20, 2023.
Feminists should denounce rape in the strongest words, whoever commits it, and whoever the victim or survivor is. That is a given. But it is also a given for anticolonial feminists that the alleged reports of sexual assault are being sensationalized and weaponized to distract from, or even justify, Israel’s accelerated genocide of the Palestinian people.
The sensationalizing is all the more jarring when there seems to be an inexplicable lack of evidence to corroborate any of the stories being circulated. And the denunciation of (possible yet unconfirmed) sexual violence against Israeli women, by women who have not uttered a word against the fully documented decades-long, systematic gender violence against Palestinians, is simply an illustration of racism, rather than feminism.
Author’s Postscript
At the time of this essay going to print, the United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict issued a report determining that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the October 7 attacks.” The report indicates the UN team did not conduct a full investigation, relying instead on photographs and secondhand reports which suggest that “although circumstantial, such a pattern … may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence.”33Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, “Sexual Violence in Conflict.” United Nations, March 4, 2024, 4. My essay does not suggest that no instances of sexual violence occurred during the October 7 attacks. Rather, my argument is that Israel is weaponizing unsubstantiated and sensationalized allegations of systemic gang rapes, while itself engaging in reproductive genocide. ×
Notes & References
- Raz Segal, “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” Jewish Currents, October 13, 2023.
- Jake Johnson, “800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May be Perpetrating ‘Crime of Genocide’ in Gaza,” Common Dreams, October 18, 2023.
- Fatima al-Kassab, “A Top UN Court Says Gaza Genocide Is ‘Plausible,’ but Does Not Order Ceasefire,” NPR, January 26, 2024.
- “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” United Nations.
- South Africa, “Application Instituting Proceedings,” International Court of Justice, document no. 192-20231228-APP-01-00-EN.
- Ibid.
- Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007).
- Staff, “Israeli Minister Says, ‘He Can Forgive Instances of Rape,’ 1948 Documents Reveal,” Middle East Eye, January 6, 2022.
- See, for example, Mindy Levy et al., “Israeli and Palestinian Midwives,” in Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier: Speaking Truth to Power, Betty-Anne Daviss and Robbie Davis-Floyd, eds. (London: Routledge, 2020).
- Yoram Ettinger, “2023 Update: No Arab Demographic Time Bomb,” Jewish News Syndicate, March 19, 2023. “Judea and Samaria” is how Zionists refer to the West Bank.
- Tamam Mohsin, “How Colonizers Weaponize Rape: Reflections from the Palestinian Case,” Mondoweiss, August 8, 2022.
- Dylann N., “Sexual Harassment and Violence against Palestinian Women in Israeli Prisons,” The Jerusalem Fund, August 3, 2018.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- See, for example, Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella, “Screams without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7,” The New York Times, December 28, 2023. The article, which claims to be a thorough investigation, relies exclusively on secondhand sources, many of whom have been discredited, as the Israeli government itself stated that some of what they reported, such as the beheading of babies, simply did not take place.
- Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, “Israeli Hostage Mia Schem Reveals Only Reason Hamas Captor Didn’t Rape Her During 54 Hellish Days,” The New York Post, January 1, 2024.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid. (emphasis added).
- See “Israeli hostage Yarden Roman-Gat shares details of her captivity in Gaza,” 60 Minutes, December 17, 2023.
- Ibid.