Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 31.12.2023
Healthcare Watch – Palestine said: “We report a total of 140 HCWs killed including 44 doctors, dentists, and medical students as a result of the Israeli attacks on #Gaza between 7th Oct-2nd Nov 2023!
23.11.2023 Update by Healthcare Watch – Palestine:
249 healthcare workers were killed by IOF in #Gaza since October 7th, including 90 doctors, 77 nurses, and 82 other HCW
On 25.11.2023 Healthcare Watch – Palestine said:
We can confirm that 10 Gazan Doctors were kidnapped by IOF after heading south through the Israeli-designated “safe route. While there is a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, Israel Occupation Forces’ thirst for doctors’ blood continues. The IOF have just murdered Dr. Ahmed Abu AL Rub, a General Practitioner from Jenin.
On 28.11.2023 Update: 254 healthcare workers were killed by IOF in #Gaza since October 7th, including 92 doctors, 80 nurses, and 82 other Health care workers- HCWs”
On December 19 Healthcare Workers Watch – Palestine said that Israeli forces are abducting and torturing Palestinian health care workers.
Healthcare Workers Watch – Palestine of the 20 of December has informed that 110 Palestinian healthcare workers were abducted by IOF (Israel Occupation Forces).
The Zionist armed goons not only torture and kill Health workers but are looting the houses in Gaza.
“Since Israel launched a ground operation in Gaza in late October, footage has emerged of troops carrying out violent and provocative acts that appear to have little to do with furthering their stated aim of destroying Hamas.
This has included theft, destruction of businesses and properties, vandalism, and the installation of Israeli and Jewish symbols across Gaza’s neighborhoods. Such behavior has been blamed on indiscipline, but analysts believe it is also a form of “psychological warfare”.
In one example of theft, a soldier bragged about stealing a silver necklace from Gaza to take back to his girlfriend in Israel. Another troop stole a rug from a Palestinian home.
In a post shared on a popular Facebook group, an Israeli officer gloated about seizing a host of sealed makeup items to take to Israel as “gifts from Gaza” [1]
Considering what we know about torture and rape of Palestinian women in Israeli prisons and the killing of civilians including doctors and nurses and looting in Gaza it is very hard not to believe that Israeli soldiers do not rape Palestinian women in Gaza and the West Bank in this war as in 1948. For example, the Safsaf massacre took place on 29 October 1948, following the capture of the Palestinian Arab village of Safsaf in the Galilee by the Israeli army. The village was defended by the Arab Liberation Army’s Second Yarmuk Battalion.
“Safsaf was the first village to fall in Operation Hiram, the aim of which, according to the IDF, was to “destroy the enemy in the central Galilee ‘pocket,’ to take control of the whole of the Galilee and to establish a defense line on the country’s northern border] The village was attacked by two platoons of armored cars and a tank company from the 7th Brigade, and a fierce battle lasted from the evening until seven o’clock the next morning.
Evidence of a massacre in which 52–64 villagers were killed by the IDF comes from several contemporaneous Israeli government sources and Arab oral history. The evidence suggests that 52 men had their hands tied, were shot and killed, and were buried in a pit. Several women reported allegations of rape by the IDF, including the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl At least two internal inquiries were initiated during 1948–49 by the Zionist army but their reports remain classified.
Israeli soldiers massacred between fifty and seventy Palestinians in the Galilean village of Safsaf on this date in 1948, following a twelve-hour battle between Israeli forces and a division of the Arab Liberation Army. “In Safsaf, after . . . the inhabitants had raised a white flag,” wrote Yosef Nahmani, a senior Israeli officer, in his diary, “the [soldiers] collected and separated the men and women, tied the hands of fifty-sixty fellahin and shot and killed them and buried them in a pit. Also, they raped several women,” including a 14-year-old. “Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis?,” Nahmani continued. “. . . Is there no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than by such methods?” [2]
The researcher Revital Madarr wrote:
“Scholars researching Israeli state sexual violence against Palestinians have likewise turned their gaze to less visible spaces, such as prisons, courtrooms, and investigation rooms, and to perpetrators who are not necessarily soldiers (Al Issa and Beck 2020; Medien 2021), examined the sexual torture of Palestinian men (Weishut 2015), discussed Palestinian women’s fear of rape by Israeli security forces (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1993), analyzed representations of rape in Palestinians literature (Nashef 2022), and illustrated how Palestinian women’s narratives are locked within “colonial loops of displacement” (Ghanayem 2019). What these works share is an understanding that the colonial nature of Israeli control over Palestinians—within the green line and in the oPt—is constitutive to how we should approach rape and other forms of sexual violence in colonial and settler-colonial settings and overcome this silence, rather than treat it as indicative of an occupation from which sexual violence is absent” [3]
Thus the allegation that Israeli women were raped by Hamas is believed by the Israelis and the pro Zionists mass media even though it can not be verified (it is possible that there were rapes but not by Hamas fighters but some of the angry civilians that lived for 16 years in Gaza- under siege and bombed every few years) the issue of raping Palestinian women is hidden even when A Palestinian female freed from Israeli detention said more than 15 fellow Palestinian women were raped by Israeli interrogators to force them to confess to charges leveled against them and collaborate with the Israeli intelligence.
“Israeli investigators and intelligence officers keep video tapes of the raping to blackmail the female detainees,” she told IslamOnline.net, requesting anonymity.“I have been sexually abused and photographed. When I tried to travel to Jordan after my release an Israeli intelligence officer dumbfounded me with the humiliating photos.” She asserted that this technique has been used for years by the Israeli interrogators against Palestinian detainees. “They have used this raping techniques before my detention and continue to use it until today,” said the Palestinian woman who spent nine years of her life in Israeli detention” [4]
“Geneva – An urgent international investigation must be opened into horrific crimes committed by the Israeli army during its land incursions into the Gaza Strip, including field executions, torture, and rape threats, replicating the crimes committed by Zionist gangs in 1948 said Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, citing testimonies collected from newly-released civilians.
The human rights organization highlighted the Israeli forces’ brutal storming of civilian homes in crowded residential neighborhoods during the ongoing genocide. Members of Israel’s military terrorized and beat residents, plus arrested hundreds of them, including women, children, and sick people. According to testimonies gathered by Euro-Med Monitor from several detainees who were newly released, the Israeli forces took the detainees from their homes, stripped them naked, and attacked them with machine guns, electric cables, and cold water.
Sixteen-year-old Muhammad Mahmoud Aslim told the Euro-Med team that the Israeli forces stormed his family’s home in Al-Shuja’iya neighborhood, east of Gaza City, after they were trapped for an entire week without food and water. He stated that over the past few days, Israeli forces killed everyone in his neighborhood who tried to leave their home, including Aslim’s brother. Israeli forces later stormed his family’s house, said Aslim, and destroyed its contents with heavy gunfire. His family members were gathered naked and handcuffed before being violently assaulted and beaten. Aslim still does not know what happened to his mother and sisters, who were captured and kidnapped by the Israeli armyץThe Euro-Med Monitor team has gathered statements and testimonies about Israeli special forces raiding refugee centers in Gaza City and its northern areas, which housed thousands of displaced Palestinians. These raids have involved the execution of young men who were shot with live ammunition at point-blank range.
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” [5]
Where is the mass media that spread the unverified accusation that Hamas raped Israeli women but kept quiet about torture and rape of Palestinians. What master do they serve?
Down with the Zionist state!
For Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[1] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-troops-looting-vandalism-spree-gaza
[2] https://jewishcurrents.org/october-29-safsaf-massacre-1948
[3] https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/conflict-and-society/9/1/arcs090105.xml
[4] https://www.cair.com/cair_in_the_news/israeli-guards-rape-palestinian-women/
[5] https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6023/Field-executions,-torture,-and-threats-of-rape:-In-Gaza,-Israel%E2%80%99s-army-replicates-the-crimes-committed-by-Zionist-gangs-in-1948