Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 02.02.2024
The UN and its institutions are controlled by the imperialists and the imperialists want to justify the genocide by Israel and show that Hamas raped Israeli women. For this, a team has arrived to Israel that will not examine the Israeli army and jailers’ rape of Palestinian women!
“Pramila Patten, special representative of the UN secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, arrived in Israel on Monday for a first-hand account of the sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7. According to the Foreign Ministry, which invited Patten to the Jewish state, her visit began with a series of meetings at the ministry headquarters in Jerusalem, including a meeting with the ministry’s political director, Aliza Ben Nun. Patten is also scheduled to meet with survivors, witnesses, treatment professionals and police and security forces representatives to gain a better understanding of and collect evidence regarding the Hamas atrocities committed on Oct. 7. She is also expected to meet with government and civil society representatives and tour southern Israel, along with a team of experts. Additionally, Patten plans to visit Palestinian-controlled areas in Judea and Samaria during her stay, which is expected to last into early February” [1]
Why not to meet with Palestinian women that were raped by Zionist soldiers and jailers? By Palestinian officials in Gaza? Ha they are only Arabs!
While the mass media of the imperialists time and again repeats the story of the Zionist settler colonialists killed on October 7th 2023, and the Zionists and their supporters compare this event to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis and even call Hamas fighters Nazis. While the imperialists and the UN believe the lie that Hamas raped Israeli women with the implication that the Arabs are wild savages, the Zionists massacres of groups of Palestinians are ignored and so are the real rapes by the Israeli soldiers. Genocide is the combinations of massacres, tortures and sexual abuse.
Today we are informed about at least 30 bodies found dumped inside a schoolyard in northern Gaza.
“Al Jazeera has spoken to witnesses who discovered the bodies and identified them. “As we were cleaning, we came across a pile of rubble inside the schoolyard. We were shocked to find out that dozens of dead bodies were buried under this pile,” a man said.
The moment we opened the black plastic bags, we found the bodies, already decomposed. They were blindfolded, legs and hands tied. The plastic cuffs were used on their hands and legs and cloths straps around their eyes and heads” [2]
This is not the only massacre by the Zionist in the war on Gaza.
“Geneva – The Israeli army has executed dozens of elderly Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in direct shooting operations, ” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said in a statement issued Friday. This incredibly vulnerable group of civilians is suffering twice over, said the rights organization, as Israel has turned all people in the Strip into targets since the 7 October start of its ongoing genocide against Palestinians there.
Euro-Med Monitor said that 1,049 elderly men and women have been killed during the 76-day genocide—about 1% of the estimated 107,000 elderly people who live in the Gaza Strip, and 3.9% of all Palestinian deaths during the aggression. The majority of them were crushed to death under the debris of their homes or the shelter centers where they sought safety after Israeli aircraft bombed their homes, or while being forced to seek basic necessities in the streets and marketplaces. Alarmingly, however, dozens were targeted in killings and field executions.
The Geneva-based organization stated that it had received horrifying testimony regarding killings and field executions of several people over the age of 60. These incidents included soldiers shooting elderly people immediately after ordering them to evacuate their homes, and in some cases, executing them just moments after their release from hours or days of arbitrary detention” [3]
“According to Euro-Med Monitor, the elderly Dr Akram Abu Hasira and his wife were shot and left to bleed to death by Israeli forces on Thursday 21 December, after being forcibly evacuated from their home on Yarmouk Street in Gaza City. The soldiers then set fire to their home. Their son, Dr Mahmoud Abu Hasira, reported that after the Israeli forces withdrew from the area, their family managed to bury the couple’s bodies.
Furthermore, Ahmed Suleiman Hassan Muhammad Abdel-Al, a 60-year-old mentally ill man, was shot and killed in his Jabalia camp home on 13 December, said Euro-Med Monitor. His killing occurred after Israeli soldiers stormed the camp and Abdel-Al’s home after a days-long siege on the Yemeni hospital.
Abdel Nasser Khader Haboub, 62, was also killed, Euro-Med Monitor reported, when Israeli forces fired an artillery shell at him shortly after his release from a two-day detention. This incident also claimed the lives of Palestine University’s College of Information Technology Dean Dr Ahmed Hamdi Abu Absa,.
An eyewitness told Euro-Med Monitor that Haboub and his family took refuge in the Holy Family School after an Israeli bombing targeted a house in which they were taking refuge, and that they had previously fled their own home due to the heavy Israeli bombing of Gaza City. The day after the family’s arrival at the school on 8 December, Israeli forces stormed the building and arrested all the men and some women, stripping the men and taking them to an unknown destination. After midnight on 10 December, the Israeli forces released a group of detainees including multiple elderly people, then targeted them only minutes later with a tank shell and a quadcopter flying over their heads, causing the death of Haboub along with the academic Abu Absa.
Euro-Med Monitor also documented the execution of an elderly man named Nawaf Muhammad Musa Al-Zaanin on 10 December, during the evacuation of the Awni Al-Harthani School in the Beit Lahia project in northern Gaza. The Beit Hanoun resident, Al-Zaanin, had been displaced with his family several times before Israeli forces stormed the school where they were taking refuge. He was shot in the head, the human rights organization reported.
The Euro-Med Monitor team further documented the execution of Bashir Hajji, 71, of Gaza City’s Zaytoun neighborhood. Hajji was killed by Israeli forces while attempting to cross Salah al-Din, the Strip’s main road, on 10 November. His murder occurred shortly after the Israeli army published a picture showing one of its soldiers talking to Hajji; in the picture, the soldier is pretending to be protecting and assisting Palestinian civilians during their displacement.
Hala Hajji, the granddaughter of the elderly Hajji, told the Euro-Med Monitor team that her grandfather, who appeared in the Israeli army photo, was brutally executed while crossing the displacement road. He died after being shot multiple times in the head and back, she revealed” [4]
“Geneva – In just a few hours of violent and intense air attacks on the Gaza Strip overnight, and amid a total blackout of communications and Internet services, Israel has committed its largest massacre since its establishment in 1948, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported today.
Euro-Med Monitor estimated that Israel’s overnight attacks, the scale of which is unprecedented since the start of its war on the Gaza Strip on 7 October, left more than 1,500 people dead or wounded as well as hundreds of homes destroyed, many with their residents trapped inside.
The Euro-Med team received shocking testimonies from residents of Gaza City about the intense, bloody attacks, especially from the Al-Fawaydah Harat Al-Rayes area of Gaza where scores of people were reportedly killed by hours of ceaseless bombardment” [5]
There is a myth that the Zionist army and the security forces do not rape Palestinian women. You have to be the village idiot to believe that all armies except the Zionist army rape enemy women.
In 2014, following a lecture in Israel, Catharine MacKinnon the radical bourgeois feminist contributed to this myth. She was asked about rape as a war crime and in the context of genocide. MacKinnon concluded her response with the statement that—from the testimonies she has—the Israeli army does not rape: “I spoke to Palestinian women, and they testified that there are no attacks of rape by Israeli soldiers. And that, again, is an interesting question we should address: Why do men not rape in conflicts or war? And if it doesn’t happen, why doesn’t it happen?”
In the real-world Zionist soldiers raped Palestinian women already in 1948. “The Safsaf massacre took place on 29 October 1948 A key source to what happened there are the diaries of Yosef Nachmani, a senior officer in the Haganah, who was also director of the Jewish National Fund in Eastern Galilee from 1935 until 1965. He visited Safsaf or the area around it on 6 November, accompanied by the Israeli Minority Affairs minister Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit. The men were briefed by Immanuel Friedman, a representative of the Minority Affairs ministry, who talked about “the cruel acts of our soldiers.” The Nachmani diary was released by the Israeli government in the early 1980s. It had been published before, but with the passages about the massacre omitted. On 6 November 1948, Nachmani wrote: “In Safsaf, after … The inhabitants had raised a white flag, the [soldiers] collected and separated the men and women, tied the hands of fifty-sixty fellahin [peasants] and shot and killed them and buried them in a pit. Also, they raped several women…” After listing alleged atrocities in other villages—Eilaboun, Farradiyya, and Saliha—Nachmani writes: “Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis? … Is there no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than by such methods?” [6]
We know that Palestinian women are raped in the Zionist dungeons.
“A new report compiled by AF3IRM Hawaii details a pattern of rape, abuse, trafficking, and sexual violence against Palestinian women and men. The report cites multiple press sources and firsthand accounts from Palestinian prisoners. Below are excerpts from the report.
Liberated prisoner Israa Ja’abis said upon her release: “I left little girls in my prison cell crying. Why? Because unspeakable things are happening to them there… Unimaginable things on the hands of the [IOF] soldiers.” Similarly, liberated prisoner Lama Khater described how she was blindfolded and threatened with rape as a form of intimidation against her.
A Palestinian female freed from the occupation’s prisons attested that over 15 Palestinian women were sexually assaulted by occupation forces who sought to force a confession to crimes out of the women. The zionist forces recorded these incidents on video, and used them to blackmail women following their release from prison.
Sexual abuse towards Palestinians is not limited to female prisoners. Colonial authorities often force Palestinian men and boys to remove their clothing before photographing and abusing them further. Liberated prisoner Ramzi Al-Abbasi attested to this, saying “The situation in the prison is devastating. The prisoners are abused. They are constantly beaten. They are being sexually assaulted. They are being raped” [7]
Palestinian women in Gaza do not talk about rapes by Israeli soldiers most likely because of shame. At most they mention a threat of rape. “Ms. M.Z., a resident of Al-Zaytoun neighborhood who was displaced to Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, in the southern part of the Strip, said that an Israeli soldier pointed his gun at her head and threatened to kill her even though she had told him she was five months pregnant. The soldier ordered her to take off her clothes and threatened to rape her” [8]
Revital Madar offers a way to examine whether the myth of the Israeli army of settler colonialists only commit genocide but does not rape Palestinian women is real. She writes:
“Rape is that phenomenon that is so often questioned and denied—to the point that it may seem inaccessible to the senses (Azoulay 2008: 206). However, beyond the question of visibility, the arguments of MacKinnon (2014), Nitsán (2007), and Wood (2006, 2009, 2010) about the inexistence, rarity, and limited employment of Israeli state sexual violence against Palestinians reveal the shortcomings of prioritizing speech over silence. All three scholars assume that had Israel committed sexual crimes against Palestinians, we would know about it. The absence of large-scale testimonies (or these scholars’ access to them) is sufficient to conclude that rape and other forms of sexual violence are not part of Israeli state violence. Against this tendency, scholars noted that as a mechanism of security, speech is not always possible (Hansen 2000; Win2004), and showed how silence might function as a survival mechanism (Chan 2005; Kelly 2000; Mojab 2004; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2010)” [9]
“The theoretical and the empirical are intertwined here so as to allow them to inform one another through the employment of an “ethnographic sensitivity” (Schatz 2009: 6). Thus, the empirical data I base my analysis on (testimonies of Palestinians, reports from human rights organizations, media, and literature about Israeli state sexual violence) depict a variety of forms of sexual violence committed by various actors. Th e objective behind the presentation of these sources is twofold: It is meant to question the affirmative claims over Israel’s limited and rare employment of sexual violence against Palestinians and expose their re- suppositions. In addition, their assembling together renders visible what national and international legal categories and scholarly frameworks in search for large-scale cases of wartime rape would otherwise consider as disparate cases” [10]
“To address these questions, I examine in the first section the pertinency of the main components of these claims: Israeli male soldiers, Palestinian women, rape, and war. I show how each of these categories works to: (1) limit the discourse over Israel’s use and employment of rape and other forms of sexual violence against Palestinians; (2) render the cases we do know of illegible; and (3) distract us from the colonial nature of Israeli control in the oPt and the settler-colonial structure of Israel” [11]
Based on her method she found many cases of rape by the Israeli army in the West-Bank and if this is the case in the West-Bank surely there many rapes in Gaza in time of war aimed at eliminating the people of Gaza.
Time to investigate the rapes by the Zionist state of Palestinian women!
For Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[1] https://nationalpost.com/news/u-n-official-visits-israel-to-investigate-hamas-sexual-violence-incidents
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/1/31/israels-war-on-gaza-live-severe-hunger-in-gaza-as-aid-trucks-surrounded?update=2665536
[3] https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/shocking-testimonies-reveal-execution-dozens-elderly-
[4] Ibid
[5] https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/shocking-testimonies-reveal-execution-dozens-elderly-people-israeli-army-gaza-strip-enar
[6] Morris, 2004, p. 500; Morris 1995, p. 55.
[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelCrimes/comments/18ay250/remember_that_every_accusation_is_a_confession/?rdt=65428&xpromo_edp=enabled
[8] https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6023/Field-executions,-torture,-and-threats-of-rape:-In-Gaza,-
[9] Revital Madar Beyond Male Israeli Soldiers, Palestinian Women, Rape, and War Israeli State Sexual Violence against Palestinians
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid